For more than half a century, the luminaries of the mainstream American right had a clear mission and sense of where they came from. If liberals were fixated on quixotic schemes for building a perfect society, conservatives would be on hand to do the sober work of defending liberty against tyranny. Conservatives traced their roots to 1790, with the British statesman Edmund Burke’s warnings about the dangers of revolution and his insistence on the contractual relationship between the inherited past and the imagined future. They counted the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the Austrian émigré economist Friedrich Hayek as ancestors and viewed public intellectuals, such as the American writer William F. Buckley, Jr., and people of action, such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, as fighters for the same cause: individualism, the wisdom of the market, the universal yearning for freedom, and the conviction that solutions to social problems will bubble up from below, if only government would get out of the way. As Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and forefather of the modern Republican Party, put it in The Conscience of a Conservative, in 1960, “The Conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of the social order.”
Over the last decade, however, this account has given way to an alternative reading of the past. For a vocal cohort of writers and activists, the real conservative tradition lies in what is sometimes called “integralism”—the weaving of religion, personal morality, national culture, and public policy into a unified order. This intellectual history no longer reflects the easy confidence of a Buckley, nor does it advance an argument, formed primarily in conversation with the American founders, for government resting on a balance-of-powers constitution and enabling a free citizen’s pursuit of happiness. Instead, it imagines a return to a much older order, before the wrong turn of the Enlightenment, the fetishizing of human rights, and the belief in progress—a time when nature, community, and divinity were thought to work as one indivisible whole.
Integralism was born on the Catholic right, but its reach has transcended its origins, now as an approach to politics, law, and social policy known to its promoters as “common-good conservatism.” In states such as Florida and Texas, its worldview has informed restrictions on voting access, curbs on public school curricula dealing with race and gender, and purges of school libraries. Its legal theory has shaped recent Supreme Court decisions that narrowed the rights of women and weakened the separation between religion and public institutions. Its theology has lain behind the bans on abortion passed by nearly half of U.S. state legislatures. Its proponents will be present in any future Republican presidential administration, and in their fight against liberals and cosmopolitans, they are more likely than earlier American conservatives to look for allies abroad—not on the British or European center-right but among newer, far-right parties and authoritarian governments committed to unraveling the “liberal order” at home and abroad. “They hate me and slander me and my country, as they hate you and slander you and the America you stand for,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a crowd last year in Dallas, at the annual Conservative Political Action Coalition conference, a gathering of conservative activists, politicians, and donors. “But we have a different future in mind. The globalists can all go to hell.”
For all these reasons, reading right-wing philosophers is the first step toward understanding what amounts to the most radical rethinking of the American political consensus in generations. Theorists such as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Yoram Hazony insist that the United States’ economic ills, its political discord, and its relative decline as a world power spring from a single source: the liberalism that they identify as the dominant economic, political, and cultural framework in the United States since World War II and the model that the country has spent the better part of a century foisting on the rest of the globe. Yet these ideas also point toward a deeper change in how conservatives diagnose their country’s troubles. On the American right, there is a growing intuition that the problem with liberal democracy is not just the adjective. It is also the noun.
THE BEST PEOPLE
In Regime Change, Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, is motivated by a desire to rescue a country and civilization he finds in obvious decay. He decries the obscene inequalities of wealth in the United States and writes scathingly of an avowed meritocracy that really works to reproduce privilege. He sees dissolution in growing political factionalism, a weakened affinity for the nation, and what he calls the addictions of “big tech, big finance, big porn, big weed, big pharma, and an impending artificial Meta world.”
According to Deneen, liberals have purposely eroded the basic forums of social solidarity—“family, neighborhood, association, church and religious community”—and now govern as a minority against the demos, the popular majority. In the institutions they control, from academia to Hollywood, they preach that the only reasonable life is one liberated from the constraints of duty and tradition. The assumed course from adolescence to adulthood is to learn “how to engage in ‘safe sex,’ recreational alcohol and drug use, [and] transgressive identities . . . all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the ‘culture’ comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods.” In the process, liberals have abandoned anyone not in the “laptop class”—mainly coastal urbanites—and have left the country’s geographic middle hollowed out and in despair.
For the American right, the problem with liberal democracy is not just the adjective. It is also the noun.
In Deneen’s view, the makers of this American wasteland are not just people on the left but the country’s entire political, business, and cultural elite. “What has passed as ‘conservatism’ in the United States for the past half-century,” he writes, “is today exposed as a movement that was never capable of, nor fundamentally committed to, conservation in any fundamental sense.” As a result, the problem of politics today is the crevasse that separates the powerful from the masses, a theme that Deneen follows through canonical thinkers such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Societies thrive through maintaining a “mixed constitution,” with institutions of varying levels and capacities, from the national to the local, knitting together people of different social and economic classes.
To restore such an ideal system, however, true conservatives will need to take power by employing what Deneen calls “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” Conservatives have too long acquiesced to a broadly liberal order, he believes, which has meant allying with people who seek “the primacy of the individual,” oppose the “natural family,” and even engage in the “sexualization of children,” a charge that he repeats twice in Regime Change. But today, “the many,” he says, are waking up to their class concerns “as left-economic and social-conservative populists,” desirous of a broadly redistributive economy and a society founded on virtue, responsibility, and predictability.
In the age of revolution that will follow the current “cold civil war,” remaking the country will require “aristopopulism,” a regime headed by a new elite of trained aristoi—from the Greek for “the best people”—“who understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.” This new order will favor what Deneen calls, following the British journalist David Goodhart, “somewhere people” over “anywhere people,” or Americans who are embedded in thick communities of purpose as opposed to the mobile globalists now in charge. To get there, the country will need a larger House of Representatives, better vocational education, revitalized public schools, paid family leave, and reined-in corporations—goals that liberals, too, might applaud—but also more public celebration of the nation’s “Christian roots” and a cabinet-level “family czar” to encourage marriage and pregnancy, an approach that, as Deneen points out, can be found in Orban’s Hungary.
THE HIGHEST GOOD
Deneen’s alternative to an exhausted, licentious liberalism is a form of politics that stresses “the priority of culture, the wisdom of the people,” and “preserving the commonplace traditions of a polity,” that is, a conservatism that seeks what he and other writers label “the common good.” In their usage, that term denotes not so much valuing the commonweal as building a specific type of society: communal, local, and hierarchical. In the realm of law and practical policy, no one has done more to define this kind of common good than Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School.
Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism is a work of legal interpretation rather than political theory, but his aim, like Deneen’s, is to recover a mode of thinking that he believes predates the Enlightenment. The measure of law is not whether it guards individual rights, which Vermeule believes are not foundational to legal order. It is whether law enables “the highest felicity or happiness of the whole political community, which is also the highest good of the individuals comprising that community.” The common good is “unitary and indivisible, not an aggregation of individual utilities,” a definition that means preferring judicial rulings that promote solidarity and subsidiarity: favoring obligation to one’s family and community, empowering lower levels of authority such as states and towns, and upholding what Vermeule understands as natural law and the “immemorial tradition” of ancient Rome and the modern United Kingdom.
For anyone not steeped in legal theory, Vermeule’s work can be hard going, but its implications come through. Human rights are legal conveniences delimited by the degree to which they serve the common good. The “administrative state”—the agencies that implement legislation—is not inherently evil, as some conservatives insist. Rather, it should simply be turned toward the realization of the common good, a point that parallels Deneen’s “stewards and caretakers,” the aristoi, who are properly educated, via the Western canon, to recognize good things when they see them.
Past Supreme Court decisions grounded in expansive individual rights, Vermeule believes, will have to fall. “The Court’s jurisprudence on free speech, abortion, sexual liberties, and related matters will prove vulnerable under a regime of common good constitutionalism.” But conservatives overconcerned with individual liberty are also a problem. Government can and should judge the “quality and moral worth” of free speech. There is no absolute right to refuse vaccination if it is necessary for public health. Libertarian “property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.”
Throughout Common Good Constitutionalism, what purports to be a theory of law is in fact a wholesale rethinking of legitimacy. In Vermeule’s view, the basis for rightful authority is not custom, charisma, or rationality, as the German sociologist Max Weber had it, but the “objective legal and moral order” that common-good constitutionalists are best placed to perceive. Democracy and elections, Vermeule says, have no special claim to delivering the common good. A “range of regime-types can be ordered to the common good, or not.” Liberals have erected a constitutional order in which legitimacy derives from rights-bearing individuals who periodically choose representatives to write statutes, judge disputes, and keep the peace. But if those structures produce outcomes contrary to the common good, they will have to be dismantled. This worldview, Vermeule concedes, may prove “difficult for the liberal mind to process.”
BONDS OF LOYALTY
To chart how conservatives might recover the heritage from which Deneen and Vermeule derive their theories is one of the aims of Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Like Deneen, Hazony, an Israeli American scholar and president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, vividly describes the hellscape produced by the liberal order and prophesizes its impending collapse. But he is open to the idea that “anti-Marxist liberals” might be brought into an alliance with conservatism properly understood, which he defines as “the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.” The most important step, Hazony believes, is to overturn the separation of church and state and “restore Christianity as the normative framework and standard determining public life in every setting in which this aim can be attained, along with suitable carve-outs creating spheres of legitimate non-compliance.” If liberals monopolized the public sphere by privatizing conservative values—encouraging one group of students to celebrate sexual diversity during Pride Month, say, but banning another from using school property for organized Bible study—then a renewed conservatism would simply flip the script. Public life would return to being unapologetically nationalist and communally religious.
For Hazony, the common good can be divined from an open-eyed examination of history and nature. People are born into existing units of loyalty, such as families and nations, a fact that in turn produces obligations toward these collectives. A family propagates itself biologically, while a nation develops its unique language, religion, and laws to ensure its existence into future generations. Hazony follows these principles through the history of English constitutional law and the rise of the Federalists, whom he sees as the original American nation builders, to the fatal abandonment of “Christian democracy” in favor of “liberal democracy” after World War II.
Hazony’s treatment of legal and political history is serious, if tendentious, but when it comes to philosophy, Conservatism is at base a manifesto, a literary form that aims to buck up the already converted and, as such, substitutes serial assertion for argument. “Human beings constantly desire and actively pursue the health and prosperity of the family, clan, tribe, or nation to which they are tied by bonds of mutual loyalty,” he writes, a claim that raises the question of why liberals have had such an easy time subverting them all. Overall, his point of view is that of an analytical and programmatic nationalist. He believes in the unchanged continuity of culturally defined nations through time, their immemorial primacy as a form of social organization, and their universal role in underpinning legitimate states—propositions that decades of evidence-based scholarship in history and the social sciences have shown to be, to put it simply, false. Many liberals are patriotic, community spirited, and religiously devout. It is just that they do not typically feel the need to mobilize the entirety of the past to sanction those commitments.
A theme that Deneen, Vermeule, and Hazony return to again and again is the family, which is often code for their disapproval of the existence of gay and transgender people. With regard to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, Vermeule finds the decision to be a textbook example of liberal overreach—but not for the reason one might think. The real problem was not that the Court usurped the power of Congress, as a conservative might once have argued. Rather, it was that “marriage can only be the union of a man and a woman” since that definition accords with biological reproduction. The ruling thus established the “ultimate valorization of will at the expense of natural reason” by separating marriage from its role in perpetuating “a continuous political community.” For Deneen, too, families headed by gay couples are the preeminent example of the limitless lives that liberals feel empowered to think into being—which, like the entire “liberationist ethos of progressive liberalism,” must necessarily make a victim out of people like him. As he writes, the “presumption seems to be that the only true path to human reconciliation is through the effective elimination of the one oppressor class in existence—white, heterosexual Christian men (and anyone sympathizing with them).” As with the extreme right in Russia, the European Union, and elsewhere, it does not take a deep reading of these writers to find an unshielded bigotry at the heart of their civilizational angst.
Anger, Sorrow, and Fear
Many people will recognize the American crisis that torments Deneen, Vermeule, and Hazony and perhaps even share their longing for sincere politicians whose goal is to make things better. But a syndrome is not the same thing as a disease. The latter has a clear cause; the former does not. The source of the present troubles, they believe, is the entire liberal order, which, like the term “woke,” ends up being a container for everything they dislike. And since these writers work mainly at the level of grand theory, their arguments skim seductively over social facts without delving into their multiple causes. Falling life expectancy, the hollowing out of public education, gun violence as the leading cause of death of American children, the homeless citizens living in tent encampments from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles—these are the result of specific policy choices, at different levels of government and born of different agendas, not of liberalism run amok.
Most worryingly, Deneen and Hazony make the grievances of an abused majority out of what are in fact the right-wing, ethnocultural commitments of a numerical minority. On issues such as state-supported health care, a higher federal minimum wage, abortion, and gun control, Americans are about equally divided or on the center-left. Even 56 percent of Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center poll. Public approval of marriage equality has increased steadily since the 1990s, to a record high of 71 percent in a Gallup poll last year. White evangelical Protestants, a mainstay of support for former U.S. President Donald Trump, constitute a historic low of 14 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. The elite, too, is no longer what common-good conservatives might imagine. For more than a decade, the most-educated, highest-earning cultural group in the United States has been not godless cosmopolitans but Indian Americans, principally Hindus and Muslims, nearly three-quarters of whom, according to a 2020 Carnegie Endowment survey, say that religion plays an important role in their lives. In this environment, to claim that “America is a Christian nation” is no more than to say, “I wish it were.”
The real worry is that a hardened political minority has already concluded that its only way of reversing these trends is to give up altogether on political participation, an independent judiciary, and human rights. Deneen, Vermeule, and Hazony provide the intellectual backfill for precisely that strategy. All three authors situate themselves inside a tradition they believe stretches into antiquity, but their work recalls a more recent one: the jeremiads about American degeneracy and last-chance renewal produced a century ago, such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was a scientific racist and a progressive, which today’s common-good conservatives clearly are not. But their policy recommendations are in large part the same as his: tighten immigration restrictions, maintain the supremacy of Anglo-American culture, defend the country’s Christian (or, for Hazony, Christian and Orthodox Jewish) core, and shore up the nation against the “dissolute individuals” who have made a “sick society,” as Hazony puts it. At the center of these prescriptions is the belief that what others might see as social change, or even progress, can be nothing but loss.
These authors’ engulfing anger produces prose that is by turns elegiac, evangelizing, and blusterous, delivered with the self-assurance of a college sophomore conversant with all of human history. But more important, their anger lays waste to their empathy. Deneen writes warmly of a world made safe for “sound marriage, happy children, a multiplicity of siblings and cousins” and “the memory of the dead in our midst.” Hazony devotes the final portions of Conservatism to a moving account of his love for his wife and children and his thoughts on building a life of honor and virtue. Yet when it comes to other people’s children, communities, flourishing, and love, these authors’ disdain is shocking, like the rumble of a chanting crowd.
The anger of the authors lays waste to their empathy.
There is particular sorrow in seeing erudite men indulge their own cruelty. When they encourage it in others, the sorrow becomes fear. As earlier anti-left writers such as Hayek insisted, any attempt to define the ends of life disconnected from the will of living beings is a form of collectivism, which in turn is the source of unfreedom and, worse, inhumanity. To throw out that line of thinking is to reject a tradition of its own: the array of ideas produced across the political spectrum, from Oakeshott to Hayek to Buckley, from Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin, which placed actual people—not nations, races, or classes—at the center of civilized society.
Today, a mobilized segment of American intellectuals, politicians, and the voting public view themselves as part of an international coalition of the aggrieved, people whose core desire is precisely the “regime change” that Deneen advocates. It is commonplace to point out that Trump, Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and other authoritarian leaders are versions of the same political type, perhaps even the same psychological one. But what is even more worrying is that the United States has developed an ecosystem to produce future leaders of this sort: a party, a media space, a financial base, and now even an American school of illiberal thought. In this way the United States is in the odd position of being both the world’s most ardent champion of the liberal order—meaning a rules-based, cooperative system of states that themselves profess liberal values—and one of its potential threats. As never before, which way the country leans will depend entirely on the results of future electoral cycles.
The point of liberal values—the ones embraced by many progressives, classical liberals, and mainstream conservatives alike—is not that they are timeless or guarantee happiness. It is that they rest on the one thing in social life we can all be sure of: that we will encounter other individuals, different from ourselves, with their own preferences, ambitions, and worldviews. Put aside the complicated metaphysics and speculative theology, and what is left is human beings struggling to patch a ship already at sea: to find ways to live together peacefully—and even prosper—in a changing, plural world.
Traditional American liberalism held that greater equality would enable achievement for all. Traditional American conservatism warned that grand schemes for improvement usually end up as disasters. That is still a debate worth having. But for all their differences, these older camps shared an ability to recognize tyranny when they saw it, whether in the Soviet Union, the Jim Crow South, or philosophies that claim God, History, or Nature as a comrade. On the American right, time may be running out to recover that sense of reality.
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