The Triumph of the Political:

Post-"liberalism" at the end of the American Ideology

Earlier this year, my essay The Triumph of the Political was published in Paul Gottfried’s recent anthology. Several people have expressed interest in reading the essay but the volume is expensive and I’m not really allowed to share the whole essay in digital form. This post serves as a summary statement of the content therein.

While that essay was written in the particular context of explaining why many (such as myself) have left the libertarian political ideology, I think it is of broader value. The reason for this, I am convinced, and as I explain in that essay, is that libertarianism is the most precise and pure formulation of a more general classical liberalism that reaches back into the contributions of Enlightenment political theory.

This isn’t to say that the strictures of libertarianism cannot be severed from Enlightenment presuppositions, if one really wants to make use of them on different grounds. But the point here is that the prevailing body of political rhetoric from which all major political stances are taken in the twentieth century stem from Enlightenment thinking. And therefore, to critique libertarianism is in many ways to critique a general spirit that sits behind the American mythos as it has developed since World War II.

The American Ideology is characterized by a number of different features and it would take a full essay to explore these. But in short, the American ideology leverages the enlightenment rhetoric of individual rights, equality, and democracy and seeks to administer these things via bureaucracy, expertise, and central management, even to the point of militantly exporting these “values” around the Western world.

It is obvious that the purported ideology of the Western establishment (individual rights, democracy, equality, and liberty) do not, in point of fact, describe the actions of the Western regimes themselves. Any historical definition of “liberalism” clearly does not describe the actual nature of Western power, but nevertheless, I do think we can say that the political rhetoric of the twentieth century largely fits the enlightenment liberal paradigm. That is to say, the West is lying about being liberal; and liberalism no longer has real world meaning.

This is actually part of my point: it was a fundamental aspect of the American ideology to think of politics as having been overcome, having been proved outdated and superseded by things like expertise, legal rationalism, liberal ideals, and political science as an objective and perfectible approach to statecraft. But, I heartily contend, this has failed; politics has triumphed. Politics remains, and we see before us a Total Politicalization.

The subtitle of my essay is “Post-libertarianism at the end of the American ideology.” I argue that in the 70s and 80s especially, there was an alliance between the libertarians and the conservatives that reflected a dual opposition to the American Federal Government and its twentieth-century transformation into an increasingly totalitarian administrative state. Robert Nisbet called libertarians and conservatives “uneasy cousins.”

The traditionalist conservatives and the paleoconservatives (these are distinct categories, with much overlap) opposed the American Ideology and the Government that sought to bring it to fruition for different reasons than did the libertarians. Their alliance was one of circumstance, not of fundamental approach to political affairs. Libertarians rightly argued that the American administrative state made a mockery of liberal ideals and that the essence of the American system in the twentieth century was one of a totalizing Absolute Bureaucracy. The libertarian rejected the entire trajectory of the American state, and called for the actual implementation of liberalism’s most basic foundations. On the other hand, the traditionalist/paleos, rejected not only the actual form taken by the American Administrative State, but also the political worldview on which this system pretends to have been constructed.¹

I then make my distinction between Particularism and Universalism. I’ve greatly explicated this distinction here. In sum, I believe that most modern political theories seek to develop a political system, tied closely to a concomitant system of legal principles, that should sit above all human political orders and act as the standard by which political systems are to be judged, and conformed. For libertarians, they believe that political orders should take on libertarian formulations, to be maximally just or prosperous or harmonious (etc). For Marxists and theonomists and Jacobins and so forth, they have their own universalist system that the nations should adopt.

That Universalism is juxtaposed to Particularism which instead urges that one’s society should do and act and prioritize what is good for that specific society, in light to changing real world political threats and the interests of the metaphysical community, informed by its own traditions, customs, and way of life. As I previously wrote:

This conservative-particularist approach to political priorities values historically rooted institutions, organic hierarchies, and inherited socio-political customs. Such inherited customs include rights, obligations, and political procedures that are aspects of specific social orders and their members. Thus, the particularist disposition perceives social problems not through the lens of universal abstractions and political ideals that transcend specific issues, but focuses rather on the peculiar needs and conditions of the varying interests within an actual, real-world political order.

Having distinguished between libertarianism (liberalism) and traditionalism/paleoconservatism as types, I then turn to four fundamental weaknesses of the liberalism/libertarianism camp that have, in the last two decades especially motivated the rise of paleoconservatism’s rediscovery.

These four critiques, in my opinion, are the strongest reasons why someone should not be libertarian. But in offering these, I’m actually seeking to critique an overall approach that applies to Americanized modernity²: the impulses of Liberals, most contemporary Conservatives, Progressives, and even tiny groups like theonomists and even some operating under the Christian Nationalist label (but not Stephen Wolfe—a particularist—and those who have really digested his book).

The four critiques are categorized as follows

1. The nature of society.

2. Lessons regarding power, through the insights of James Burnham

3. Lessons regarding the political, through the insights of Carl Schmitt

4. Lessons regarding cultural hegemony, through the insights of Antonio Gramsci

The Nature of Society

It’s difficult to be brief here, but the essence of the argument is that, for the particularist conservative, rights and duties are the product of the historical-political process, usually over the course of centuries. This is because society is structured around the theme of representation: parents, have the authority to represent and act on behalf of their children. The parents too were born into the social order in this way, as the social order precedes any given individual going back thousands of years. The libertarian philosopher Hans Hoppe convinced many libertarians of the legitimacy of what he called “Covenant Communities.” It is when one realizes that all individuals were born into previously structured orders and inherit certain rights and duties, one becomes a conservative. The idea that one can make demands that the social order conform to universal claims of right and liberty is nonsense in this paradigm. Western (Anglo-Saxon) rights and liberties were products of historical development.

Lessons of Power: James Burnham

James Burnham emphasized the point that power can only be constrained by competing units of power; it cannot be constrained by ideological commitments. The libertarian and the classical liberal do not take into account the fact that, in pursuit of their quest for the implementation of liberty, they are actually undermining their own objectives in denying to themselves the legitimacy of wielding power. Liberty is the product of Power confronting and stalemating Power.

Burnham’s famous lines from The Machiavellians were:

there are no exceptions. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of goodwill, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders or businessman, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. Only power restrains power. That restraining power is expressed in the existence and activity of oppositions. When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do.

The appeal to Constitutional restraints, while certainly alluring, are not an actual exercise of power. The only way to implement Constitutional restraints is the implementation of political will against those who do not care about the Constitutionalism. This political will, of course, would require unconstitutional actions. The Constitution needs a defender who is above the prescribed limits of the Constitution, especially in our post-Constitutional epoch.

In short: the well-meaning liberal and the libertarian must face the fact that wielding-power is non-negotiable if the objective is to meaningfully confront the political tyrants who rule over us.

Lessons of the Political: Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt, the controversial German jurist, was heavily critical of the theories of those who thought society could order themselves in a way that transcended politics. The political, for Schmitt, was the manifestation of the fundamental fact that there are always competing visions of the social order such that, if one vision is successful, it will eliminate the way of life of those operating under mutually exclusive visions. He articulated this using the distinction between political Friends and Enemies. Politics, he argued, was at its essence not in the ready-to-compromise meeting of the minds between compatriots, but in the recognition that there exist interested parties who would seek to make of the social order a system that would eliminate other parties.

It is a denial of the Concept of the Political to pretend like a completely open society can exist, which offers all types of ideologues and participants an equal seat at the table. Schmitt made many of these observations in the context of the (purportedly liberal) Weimar Constitution: if Germany was to pretend like all groups have equal access to power, what would prevent Marxists or Nazis from legitimately and legally acquiring the reigns of the state, and then deciding to shut down the liberal structure of things? Was not Schmitt vindicated in his 1930s writings? Liberalism does not have the means to prevent its own takeover, and it ignores this weakness because it refuses to admit that there are mutually exclusive political actors in the world, all vying for power.

Schmitt observed that liberalism ignores this political essence of man’s existence. I wrote in my essay:

[Liberalism] attempts to supersede so-called outdated levels of intense political hostility by relegating such tensions to private economic competition, the “marketplace of ideas,” or competing ideological sects. Thus, conflict over once existential “ways of life” can be pacified and consigned to personal preference, allegedly. A core aspect of the meaning of liberalism itself, according to Schmitt, is that it is dedicated to the “negation of the political.” Paul Gottfried sums up this position as follows: “Liberals minimize the importance of the state in order to avoid political struggle. At the same time, they reduce governing to procedural matters and the interplay of parliamentary parties…. Liberalism brings about or accelerates the dissolution of state and politics, subordinating both to the ‘individualistic domain of private law and morality’ and finally to economics.”

For Schmitt overcoming the basic presence of the political antithesis (friend vs. enemy) in society is impossible, so the liberal experiment will actually result in the total politicization of the liberal regimes.

Lessons of Cultural Hegemony: Antonio Gramsci

I’ve also written about this section separately here. The role of Gramsci’s thinking in undermining the liberal-libertarian instinct has to do with the political implications of the radical capture of cultural institutions. If there’s anything in the present political situation that should speak volumes to the anti-Left, it’s the emergency of cultural capture. It’s hard to think of a historical moment in the last thousand years of the West when the cultural has been so totally captured by an impulse so hostile to our history, heritage, and way of life. And this capture has donned the rhetoric of freedom and the rights of expression, speech, and property.

Gramsci comprehended that this apparently open society provided certain opportunities for takeover. In contradiction to the liberal narrative, the state was not constrained in its interests merely to those activities having to do with coercion. Rather, its power, as well as its character and activity, rested on its ability to organize consent outside its technical governing tasks. Under the regime of Liberalism, those in power exercised two forms of control: coer- cion (its formal power) and at least the possibility of cultural hegemony. This possibility was already inherent in the liberal political framework and could be enlisted for radical change.

If political power in the West depended on the organization of a general consensus, those who sought to capture power in the West ought to take command of that condition and shape it to their advantage. The subversion of minds, the undermining of organic culture, and a long-term siege of civil society would prove to be the appropriate path for breaking down resistance. Gramsci therefore is a pioneer in the subfield of political science that concentrates on the element of socio-political life neglected by the enthusiasts for Liberalism: namely, the subversion of civil society through revolutionary forces. The Liberal Democratic model held that coercion pertained to the state but that freedom operated in civil society. Gramsci saw that both the state and civil society were vulnerable to takeover by revolutionaries.

He realized that norms and customs, habits, and ways of life, were not brought to society by socially detached individuals. They were the products of already existing institutions, some of which stretched back thousands of years. Churches, families, guilds, trades, land holdings, academies, and associations were the shapers of our ideas and basic suppositions about the world. Once those institutions fell to revolutionary ideologies at odds with the old liberal state, the liberal regime had no mechanism to prevent its takeover. The state was, after all, formally neutral: that is, it could be swayed by determined, well-organized power blocs. No matter how large the liberal state became, it was always necessarily weak, unable by definition to prevent its own occupation by totalitarian movements operating within the legitimate boundaries of its own creation. Once the institutions were captured, the state would come to support those who captured it. The state’s coercive capabilities would be at the disposal of those anti-liberals who took command of it.

Conclusion

Given that this “summary” is already excessive, I’ll keep my conclusion brief. The above four points have bolstered an understanding of political theory that is necessarily circumstantial and particular: our threats, and our needs, depend on political and cultural circumstance. Our threats are not those of Italy in the 15th century; and neither are the institutions that are worth defending. What Americans need in our time is not whimsical sentimentality (“Why can’t we just peaceably live and let live?”) or ideological universals (here is the universal code of justice we must submit to), but the employment of power against specific political threats—even if these political threats are being born within what used to be called “private society.”

Our way of life, and the very real and empirical people that constitute our political order, are under threat. While we celebrated our Overcoming of History and the implementation of a Propositional Nation dedicated to equality, universal ideals, and the brotherhood of man, we pretended like the Political element of man’s experience had been conquered.

I’ll conclude here in quotation from my original essay:

The political has triumphed. Liberalism was unable to maintain itself and to prevent its own capture. It only operated for as long as no serious opponent captured it as the champion of a more expansive liberalism.

[O]ne becomes a true paleoconservative, a true man of the Right, when one comes to terms with the fact that the defenders of social order must always face political enemies, the iron laws of power, and aspirants for cultural hegemony. The “temporary” nature of specific political problems and struggles is a constant element of human life.

Politics is forever an aspect of the human experience and to deny this does not change the reality. In the real world of the political, as summarized by Auron MacIntyre, “the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone.”

1. This is a difficult topic in itself, for the contradictions within the American Ideology are legion. They at the same time wrap their efforts in enlightenment garb, but also justify their actions with new sciences, such as Keynesian economic management, Freudian psychology,

2. I do want to emphasize “Americanized modernity.” One might say that modernist political theory really flowered with people like Thomas Hobbes. But I do read Hobbes through Gottfried and Schmitt. And Hobbes was a fierce circumstantialist who would have denied the universalism that characterizes Americanism and libertarianism. You will find some elements of Hobbes in this article, but what I take from him is how to do politics in light of the collapse of a metaphysical consensus (Christendom). I do not endorse this collapse, but merely seek to treat it as a reality that must be accounted for.