JD Vance’s Ideas Will Never Work

(Photo Illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

Why Postliberalism Failed by James M. Patterson and Thomas D. Howes Acton Institute, 402 pp., $16.95

IN 2018, THE NOTRE DAME POLITICAL THEORIST Patrick Deneen published Why Liberalism Failed, a book that argues liberalism is in a state of terminal decline. It caught a cultural wave at the time and was widely discussed, even appearing on Barack Obama’s list of his favorite books that year. Since then, Deneen has been at the vanguard of a movement that calls itself “postliberalism,” which seeks to diagnose the reasons for the alleged failure of liberalism and build the foundations for the society and government that will succeed it.

The central postliberal claim is that liberalism was always doomed to fail because it is inconsistent with human nature. Postliberals say the society liberalism creates is one of atomized individuals who privilege their own selfish interests over the “common good.” They deny or downplay the immense gains in human welfare secured by liberalism, from market reforms that lifted billions out of extreme poverty and catalyzed dramatic economic growth to the successive waves of democratization that secured political freedom around the globe. In the United States, liberal institutions have been under sustained assault for the past decade; postliberal intellectuals have played a pivotal role in the attack by providing illiberal elites with the intellectual justifications for their turn toward authoritarianism.

In their new book Why Postliberalism Failed, political scientist James M. Patterson and philosopher Thomas D. Howes invert Deneen’s argument by contending that, in reality, it is postliberal movements and states that have always collapsed. While postliberalism is often discussed as a novel political theory, Patterson and Howes argue that it has a long and sordid history that extends from the reactionary upheavals following the French and American Revolutions through several European dictatorships that seized power after World War I and on to today. The core theme of the book is that states with postliberal ideologies were invariably destroyed by forces inherent to the regime, including brutal ethnic and religious discrimination and dissolution, corruption, paranoia (which was often intensely antisemitic), economic incompetence, collusion with fascist powers, and mass state violence.

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Patterson and Howes trace postliberalism to the emergence of illiberal doctrines like ultramontanism, which sought to concentrate supreme authority in the pope’s hands, in the Catholic response to the French Revolution. “The nineteenth century popes linked liberalism with all the calamities of the French Revolution,” Patterson and Howes write, and they used “all their spiritual authority to annihilate it.” Ultramontanists argued that the pope’s authority should supersede state power, but this only led to the “political isolation of the Vatican by increasingly powerful secular states” unwilling to be dictated to by Rome. The tension between religious and temporal authority is a major theme of Why Postliberalism Failed. Many prominent postliberals today are Catholic “integralists” who believe government must ultimately serve spiritual ends, a position that demolishes the wall of separation between church and state erected by the First Amendment; the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule exemplifies this tendency. Others who identify with postliberalism are fellow-travelers with the integralists, willing to let their more aggressive co-belligerents fight their battles against liberalism.

It’s hard to think of a political ideology less suited to the historically Protestant and religiously diverse United States, let alone other, more secular liberal democracies, than explicit integralism. Recognizing this, its advocates instead use the more slippery language of “postliberalism” to describe their political project. Postliberals often claim their aim is to get political leaders to pursue the “common good,” which at first blush might sound civically virtuous and even noble-minded. But this vague and anodyne term masks what is at bottom an assertion of religious and cultural supremacy.

It was once possible to write discussions of postliberalism off as purely academic, the political theory equivalent of counting angels on a pinhead. But postliberals now walk the halls of American power. Vice President JD Vance converted to Catholicism the year after Why Liberalism Failed came out, and Deneen is a key influence on him. Vance’s postliberalism was on full display in a speech he gave in 2025 at the Claremont Institute. Vance declared that “one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the twenty-first century.” Instead of emphasizing the “creedal principles of America” and the “founding vision” of the country, he extolled a narrower conception of citizenship: “America is not just an idea, we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

This cramped and exclusionary view of American citizenship and identity is at the heart of postliberal attempts to erode pluralism. In his 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule proposes what he calls the “classical legal tradition” as an alternative to originalism, textualism, and living constitutionalism, the existing frameworks for understanding the Constitution and American law. Patterson and Howes explain that the “real purpose of the book was to convince readers to adopt a right-wing version ‘living constitutionalism,’ wherein federal courts became vehicles for his own view of right-wing public policy.” Vermeule is unusually forthright about his expansive view of executive authority: He believes the best way to advance postliberalism is with a strong centralized state with minimal constraints imposed by liberal checks and balances. Like Vance, Vermeule only embraces the United States’ founding principles and institutions to the extent that they can be instrumentalized to advance his particular conception of the common good.

As is typical for traditionalist critics of modernity, when Deneen published Why Liberalism Failed, he offered little in the way of ideas for establishing a postliberal government. He instead gestured at a sort of postliberal separatism, akin to Rod Dreher’s suggestions in The Benedict Option, a 2017 proto-postliberal tract. “At the stage of diagnosis, Deneen is masterful,” Vermeule wrote in a highly influential review of Why Liberalism Failed, but “at the stage of prescription, he relapses into liberalism.” Deneen merely “plumps for a vague communitarian localism,” which isn’t the sort of revolution Vermeule, a right-wing admirer of the executive and administrative state, has in mind. He instead suggested that “nonliberal actors strategically locate themselves within liberal institutions and work to undo the liberalism of the state from within.”

Deneen took up this challenge with his 2023 book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, which Vance celebrated as a manifesto that “articulates a vision for a populist politics that can rebuild what has been torn down.” When Trump won in 2024, some postliberals believed the future had already arrived. Gladden Pappin, a Catholic integralist and president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, wrote that “Trump’s Victory Inaugurates the Postliberal Era.”

Why Postliberalism Failed shows us why this era won’t last. Pappin is one of the many postliberals who regarded the former Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who explicitly attempted to build an “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, as a great champion of postliberalism. It turns out that Hungarians aren’t as enthusiastic about postliberalism as American intellectuals, as they threw Orbán out of office in April. This story of liberal triumph over postliberalism, which Patterson and Howes include, makes for a fitting afterword to their book.

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WHAT SETS WHY POSTLIBERALISM FAILED APART from other analyses of the movement is its insistence that earlier postliberal eras should serve as a dire warning about the one we may be entering today. Patterson and Howes provide case studies of postliberal regimes, all of which failed on their own terms or in collaboration with doomed movements like Nazism and Italian fascism. In Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, and Belgium, Catholic integralists helped to install despotic regimes only to lose their grip on power to more typical strongmen. For example, while integralists worked with Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar to seize power, Salazar’s primary base of support was the military, and he opportunistically prevented any rival political faction from gaining real countervailing power. In Vichy France, Austria, Spain, Slovakia, and Croatia, political Catholics had more power, and formal alliances between the Church and fascists occurred across Europe. What connects these cases, according to Patterson and Howes, is that they show us what postliberalism actually looked like in practice.

Why Postliberalism Failed highlights several commonalities among these interwar regimes. First, they focused political mobilization around a common enemy, particularly communists and Jews (often presented as one and the same). Indeed, one of the most striking shared features of the regimes Patterson and Howes cover is a fixation on the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theory, which holds that Jews and Freemasons fashioned liberalism to undermine the interlinked pillars of church, crown, and traditional society. This theory had real power among historical postliberals because it exploited deep reservoirs of antisemitism and blamed the manifest failures of postliberal regimes on a nefarious and shadowy cabal intent on destroying the country from within.

After the Russian Revolution, right-wing dictators like Spain’s Francisco Franco discovered the Judeo-Masonic theory to be elastic enough to suit their evolving ideological purposes. Franco became obsessed with Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevism as he fought the Soviet-backed Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, dwelling on the Masonic conspiracy. Once he realized that his fascist patrons in Germany and Italy were on the verge of losing World War II, he shifted his rhetoric to focus acutely on the threat of communism. Unlike Salazar’s Portugal, according to Patterson and Howes, Franco’s Spain was the “most analogous case along the lines stipulated by Catholic integralists” (and several present-day integralists are sympathetic to his vicious regime today). Despite this, they continue, “The result was [Franco’s] violation of every moral prohibition set by Catholic moral teaching.” Patterson and Howes argue for a revival of American Catholic republicanism, represented by figures such as Dorothy Day and Archbishop John Hughes, which they view as a repudiation of integralism and postliberalism. “These figures did not need to dismantle the constitutional order to live as faithful Catholics,” they write. “Their tradition is proof that the postliberal premise is false: you do not need a confessional state to have a faithful Church.”

Just as there’s a global movement of right-wing populists today, the postliberal regimes in the early twentieth century were connected by shared ideas and networks. Hitler and Mussolini sent weapons, troops, and other forms of military aid to Franco. French reactionaries (many of whom were involved with the nationalist movement Action française, which itself spun off many admirers in other countries) viewed the establishment of the Vichy government after the Nazi occupation as an opportunity to realize their integralist ideas. The Austrian Heimwehr, a fascist paramilitary group, received significant support from Mussolini, while Austrian Nazi sympathizers desperately hoped to join Germany. When Engelbert Dollfuß eliminated the Austrian parliament, he had the support of the Vatican and the many Austrian bishops who welcomed the arrival of dictatorship in their country. Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia was a Nazi client state that passed a slate of antisemitic laws and deported tens of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. Hungary and Italy used the fascist Ustaše in Croatia to undermine the domestic legitimacy of the state of Yugoslavia.

Another thread connecting these regimes was their catastrophic economic incompetence. Hundreds of thousands of Spanish died during the “hunger years” from 1939 to 1952 as Franco remained committed to autarky despite the mountainous evidence of its disastrous effect on the economy. When integralists took control in Argentina, Patterson and Howes write, “so began the new regime’s effort to establish a corporatist economic system that emphasized autarky.” Today’s postliberals have similar economic views: “They share with their predecessors a rabidly anti-capitalist outlook, skeptical of industrialization, while nonetheless affirming private property and rejecting socialism.” They call for a corporatist system, a view “grounded in nostalgia for the medieval guild system.”

Given that modern capitalism is grounded in liberal precepts like the rule of law and individual rights, it’s no wonder that postliberals express such hostility toward it. Deneen ignores the role of liberal market reforms that have done so much to reduce extreme poverty and have, since World War II, secured a level of prosperity unprecedented in human history. To Deneen, the liberation of women in the twentieth century merely shoved them into the “workforce of market capitalism,” a tragedy in his view.

Postliberals are forced to deny the immense scientific, economic, and political progress enabled by liberalism in order to sustain their constant narrative of liberal decline and failure. But in a more basic sense, postliberals are indifferent to the freedom and prosperity secured by liberalism because freedom and prosperity aren’t their ultimate ends.

While liberals value freedom, postliberals turn instead to deference to authority and the maintenance of some hierarchy, perhaps set forth by Heaven. While liberals believe the government is responsible for improving the health and material well-being of citizens, postliberals believe the government must prioritize their spiritual health and the well-being of their immortal souls. Liberals have a pluralistic conception of the common good that encourages individuals to pursue lives of meaning and fulfillment in whatever ways they choose (provided they don’t trespass on the rights of others to do the same). Postliberals, by contrast, define the common good much more specifically, usually as fidelity to certain religious beliefs and cultural practices. Broadly speaking, they believe the government must have the power to impose their version of the common good on everyone. Postliberals want everyone to believe what they believe and behave as they behave, but in vast and diverse societies like the United States, efforts to impose this degree of homogeneity are bound to fail.

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AT TIMES, WHY POSTLIBERALISM FAILED OVERPLAYS its hand. The main issue is that Patterson’s and Howes’s definition of postliberalism is simply too broad. After reading the profiles of nine interwar countries, including those controlled by fascists and fascist collaborators who sent tens of thousands to their deaths in the Holocaust, any honest reader must question the fairness of tarring today’s postliberals with such a ghastly historical record. “The model postliberal government,” Patterson and Howes write, “would be something like Hungary under Viktor Orbán or China under the Chinese Communist Party.” If a definition of postliberalism is so capacious that it can encompass regimes as disparate as the CCP, Orbán’s illiberal democracy, and Vichy France, its explanatory power runs thin.

Throughout Why Postliberalism Failed, Patterson and Howes constantly return to the virulent resilience of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory. It shows up everywhere, from Latin America to Central Europe; from the reactionary aftermath of the French Revolution to World War II. They claim that this prefigures the more paranoid and conspiratorial aspects of postliberalism today. They explain that today’s postliberals “explicitly relied on integralist, reactionary, fascist, and Nazi political thinkers.” And it’s true that postliberals often cite the Nazi jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Vermeule has said some sympathetic things about Salazar and Franco. The postliberal academic Nathan Pinkoski has described freemasons as a “fifth column” in contemporary politics.

And while troubling, these connections aren’t enough to draw a straight line from fascist movements and states in Europe during the twentieth century to contemporary postliberalism. Patterson and Howes initially recognize the divergence between postliberalism and antisemitic conspiracism: “Contemporary postliberals redeploy ‘liberalism’ not as a front for a conspiracy but as a blind historical force undone by its internal contradictions.” But because postliberals cite many of the figures associated with twentieth century antisemitism, Patterson and Howes go on to argue that “one can move between the ‘structural account’ of liberalism as blind historical force and the ‘conspiratorial account’ in which that force is a front for a nefarious cabal.” In other words, in relying on historical reactionaries, the postliberals create space among themselves and their followers for antisemitic conspiracy, and have no internal tools to prevent its emergence. The limitations of this uncharitable line of argument are clear in the authors’ attack on Deneen:

Deneen’s account of liberalism is based on a series of coincidences instigated by several disconnected philosophers over centuries, from the publication of Francis Bacon’s 1620 Novum Organum theorizing modern scientific method to James Madison’s 1787-8 contributions to The Federalist Papers. Each of these figures are, for Deneen, trying to develop and impose liberalism in the same way that Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theorists described Jews and Freemasons [as] doing so. . . . Deneen’s conspiracy is sufficiently weak enough for someone to be left unconvinced and therefore to look elsewhere only to end up with the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory.

Patterson and Howes even hint obliquely that “Deneen might even be halfway there himself. His embrace of the ‘Peak Oil’ theory during previous decades is enough to cause worry.” The idea that Deneen’s critiques of Bacon and Madison in Why Liberalism Failed are comparable to the vicious antisemitic conspiracism that preceded the Holocaust is unfair, as is the authors’ insinuation that Deneen’s attraction to the concept of “Peak Oil” somehow gets him “halfway” to the Judeo-Masonic theory. If a reader of Deneen is “unconvinced” by his theory of structural liberal decay and finds antisemitic conspiracism more appealing, Deneen can’t be held accountable for this trajectory.

Patterson and Howes should stick to what postliberals have actually said, such as Deneen’s absurd insistence that liberalism is “more insidious” than fascism and communism because it hides its “intention of shaping the souls under its rule.” This type of argument can be contested on its own merits instead of by innuendo. Postliberals are the ones who seek to shape souls according to their own beliefs and prejudices and, despite postliberal smears, liberalism remains the most powerful bulwark we have against such a tyrannical project.

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The contemporary postliberal record of enabling authoritarianism is undeniable. As Donald Trump attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Deneen, Vermeule, and other postliberals laundered his denialist narrative for their pseudo-sophisticated audiences. Deneen declaimed that the United States is a “unique form of liberal oligarchy that was disrupted by a momentary burst of democracy”, that is, Trump’s election in 2016. He continued: “The elite made sure to roll that back, amusingly, in the name of ‘democracy.’” Perversely, instead of confronting a president engaged in a sweeping campaign to throw out the results of an election, Deneen criticized the liberals who took issue with this assault on democracy. Vermeule, whose X account is something like the intellectualized id of postliberalism, repeatedly implied the 2020 election was illegitimate and mockingly suggested the “election isn’t over until Team Joe fixes up your ballot for you.”

Patterson and Howes are on firmer ground when they discuss the elements of interwar regimes that clearly have resonance for postliberals today: the elevation of religious authority over secular governance; the insistence that national identity is defined by certain cultural and religious traits; the embrace of centralized executive authority; the existence of an anti-liberal international coalition; resistance to central aspects of modern capitalism like free trade and industrialization; a cynical narrative of moral and political decay and civilizational collapse; and the prioritization of transcendent ends over real-world consequences in politics.

Liberalism is under siege in the West in ways we haven’t seen since World War II. American voters returned Trump to the White House after he tried to overthrow an election. Since then, he has spent eighteen months dismantling liberal democratic norms and institutions. Many intellectual justifications for MAGA are ad hoc, backcast onto Trump’s erratic behavior and the cult of personality that has been constructed around him. But it is a mistake to assume there’s no coherent ideological foundation undergirding the authoritarianism and illiberalism that have taken hold in the United States. It’s easy to be distracted by the white nationalist shitposters and cartoonish opportunists that orbit the Trump administration. But there are also more serious intellectuals with elite credentials who have helped to sustain the movement against liberal democracy. Why Postliberalism Failed is a vital effort to expose the hollow arguments of those intellectuals and arm liberals for the coming fight to restore American democracy.

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