Luke Ford

01:00 Why Is Everyone Talking About Post-Liberalism? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=165282
04:10 What Comes After Post-Liberalism with Patrick Deneen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAO_pkkizk
11:00 Stefan Molyneux, Part 2, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/stefan-molyneux-part-2-back-in-the-moly-hole
51:00 Christopher Caldwell: An Independent Fed Is an Unaccountable Fed, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/opinion/fed-rate-cut-trump.html
1:01:00 FT: Nick Fuentes and Richard Hanania’s Paganism, https://firstthings.com/nick-fuentes-and-richard-hananias-paganism/
1:23:00 The Porous Appeal: Why Institutions Misread Mike Benz, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=165255
1:24:00 Mike Benz on the January 6 pipe bomber
1:59:30 Victor Davis Hanson: The Left’s ‘Assassination Chic’ and the Inevitability of Another Attack, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au7YE_3_vGI
2:11:00 KISSINGER: Part Two | Full Documentary | American Experience, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHb3-MfKeKA
2:18:00 Video argues women are losing status in the AI era, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U15TaIgVotQ
2:26:30 Video: Life Advice That Sounds Good But Will Destroy You, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiz2XSNUPec
2:31:00 Video: Everyone is Losing Their Jobs (It’s Not Just Because of AI), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnIOTN1_ux0

Twelve years ago, liberalism felt settled. Free markets, open borders, expressive individualism, tech optimism. Now everyone from populists to technocrats to religious conservatives to speech regulators is accused of being “post-liberal.” Why?

Because the system was built on assumptions that stopped matching reality. Post-liberalism isn’t a movement. It’s a diagnostic sign.

The most important fact about liberalism is that it is a fiction. It is a useful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.

It is a fiction in that it assumes people are primarily individuals who can choose their direction in life.

Liberalism works by pretending something partial is complete.

Humans are not primarily individuals. We are embedded creatures. We inherit language, status, trauma, religion, class, sex differences, mating markets, and power structures before we make a single “choice.” Liberalism brackets all of that and says: assume an autonomous chooser, then design institutions around that fiction.

That fiction was useful.

It lowered sectarian violence. It weakened arbitrary authority. It allowed pluralism in heterogeneous societies. It let people coordinate without deep agreement. As a governance hack, it worked better than the alternatives for a long time.

But it was always incomplete.

Choice is never free-floating. Preferences are shaped. Capacities are unequal. Social rewards are unevenly distributed. Identity is porous. Liberalism treated these as background noise rather than first-order facts.

The trouble begins when the fiction hardens into dogma.

Once liberalism insists not just that we should act as if people are autonomous, but that people are autonomous, it loses the ability to see obvious realities. That families form character. That men and women respond differently to incentives. That culture determines horizons of plausibility. That power and status shape belief more than argument.

That’s where post-liberalism comes in.

Post-liberalism is not a rejection of freedom per se. It is the recognition that freedom without structure dissolves. That choice without formation produces chaos. That telling people they are free does not make them capable.

This is why the reaction is strongest among men.

Men are more exposed to institutional hollowing. When schools, churches, unions, and marriage weaken, men do not quietly self-actualize. They drift, polarize, or seek hierarchy elsewhere. Liberalism assumes they will simply choose better. Many can’t, because choice is not enough.

So men rebel not because they hate freedom, but because they feel the lie.

They are told they are sovereign individuals while living in systems that shape outcomes ruthlessly. They are blamed for failing in a world that refuses to structure success. Being told “you chose this” feels like mockery.

The fiction of liberalism worked when older moral and social structures were still doing the formative work underneath it.

Christianity, strong families, shared norms, thick communities. Liberalism rode on those without acknowledging the debt. As those structures collapsed, the fiction was exposed.

And when a fiction is exposed, people don’t gently revise it.

They swing hard toward systems that openly acknowledge constraint, hierarchy, and power. Some of those systems are humane. Some are not.

So the real task is not to abandon the fiction entirely.

It’s to recontain it. To admit it is a tool, not a truth. Liberalism must be bounded by institutions that form people before asking them to choose. Without that, the rebellion isn’t going away.

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”

[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Modern liberalism assumes buffered selves. Autonomous individuals. Markets don’t shape us. Technology just gives tools. Migration smooths out. Trade civilizes. But the last twenty years revealed a porous world. Tech rewires attention. Markets reshape culture. Migration changes moral ecologies. Trade empowers enemies. When a buffered theory governs porous systems, things break.

Free trade. Liberal economics treats trade as price and efficiency. People experienced it as community erosion, status collapse, and identity loss. GDP rose. Lives frayed.
Technology and choice. Liberalism says more choice equals more freedom. People got addiction, despair, and fragmentation because choice environments became predatory.
Demography and migration. Liberalism assumed values were portable and assimilation automatic. Low fertility plus mass migration exposed how thick identity really is.

Right-wing populists want borders and industrial policy. Technocrats want speech controls and algorithmic regulation. Cultural conservatives want moral guardrails. None of this fits classic liberal categories. But all of it arises because liberalism couldn’t manage porosity.

Post-liberalism does not mean anti-freedom or authoritarian by default. It means acknowledging limits, trade-offs, and boundary setting. The argument is not about nostalgia. It’s about governance in a world that leaks.

We will get post-liberalism either explicitly, with debate about values and limits, or implicitly, through emergency powers, corporate control, and bureaucratic coercion. The real question isn’t whether post-liberalism is coming. It’s whether it will be conscious and humane or ad hoc and ugly.

Bethel McGrew writes Dec. 3, 2025 in First Things:

The first Christians distinguished themselves from their pagan neighbors by a special care for the weak, the outcast, and the inconvenient. They refused to live by cold utilitarian logic, going out of their way to rescue human beings left to rot on the empire’s dungheaps. This instinct repulses Hanania, who regularly attacks those “crazy enough to value the fetuses of strangers.” It’s no wonder the pro-life cause is unpopular at the polls, he suggests, because if people are that crazy, it’s hard for the sane normal people to predict “what else they’re capable of.” Against this “low human capital” morality, Hanania sets his enlightened lack of “a religious belief in a thing called ‘human life’ that has some kind of inherent value.”

In general, Hanania believes that the greater good sometimes requires human sacrifice—from babies with Down syndrome, to babies born without most of their brains, to incapacitated elderly people. One might say he practices seamless-garment utilitarianism, consistently maintaining that the weak should die when they overburden the strong. If society must expend resources on “creatures who can’t be trusted to take care of themselves,” he would rather we reform factory farming than lavish attention on “people who are stupid and weak.” His rhetoric echoes Heinrich Himmler’s exasperation at those Christians who insisted that care be spent on such people “in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.”

Fuentes may not campaign for selective abortion or euthanasia, but he displays a similar root contempt for weakness and low intelligence. He’s pained by “low-IQ anti-Semitism,” obviously not because he has anything against anti-Semitism, but because it makes his version thereof look stupid by association. He appears to hate his own followers, who regularly give him Super Chat money in exchange for verbal abuse. When someone asked if he would consider a book club, Fuentes said there was no point, “because most of you are too dumb to understand the books.” Hanania observes this sadomasochistic game with something like amused admiration.

Fuentes may insist that he’s superior to the godless pagans, yet he fantasizes about a kingdom very much of this world. In a viral tweet, he says that “White people need to restore the Roman Empire like the Jews restored Israel.” Rome’s lost glory is a recurring theme of his song. A monologue about the importance of “demythologizing Hitler” incorporates the meme that white men constantly think about the Roman Empire, except Fuentes seems to be serious. Sometimes this is mixed with integralist rhetoric about crusades and Catholic monarchy, but the consistent object of his fascination is power.

That fascination is most grotesquely evident in Fuentes’s long paper trail of hypocrisy on sexual ethics, where he pays lip service to the Christian ethic while indulging in the most depraved sexual power fantasies. He holds forth on the evils of pornography, only to turn around and circulate 4chan rape cartoons. He loves to imagine himself having his way with submissive female or male partners, sometimes in a pederastic key. In other words, he longs to be a high-status man in the old pagan empire he pines for, where might made right, and any orifice would do. It’s hardly surprising that when fellow alt-right personality Ali Alexander was credibly accused of predatory homosexual acts, Fuentes rushed to downplay them.

In subtler ways, Hanania also acts as an apologist for sexual paganism, gesturing obliquely toward a loosening of boundaries around what constitutes a criminal act. One tweet polled reader reactions to a thought experiment in which a fourteen-year-old girl’s parents traffic her to Jeffrey Epstein in exchange for $10 million in a mutual fund. “Should this be allowed?” Hanania asked, curious to know how the responses broke down by gender. He followed up with a raised eyebrow at people disgusted by this thought experiment who “have names like Bob456Flyers” and photos indicating they couldn’t afford new phones. “Moralism and inability to consider hypotheticals,” he sneers, “are hallmarks of the lower classes.”

McGrew is reacting to a world where moral buffers have failed. Liberalism dissolved shared moral authority but assumed individuals would remain humane anyway. What fills the vacuum is not neutrality. It’s pagan logic. Power, hierarchy, utility, sacrifice. In a porous moral environment, virtues do not float. They are enforced or they decay.

Fuentes and Hanania are opposites politically but twins anthropologically. Both reject the Christian intuition that weakness has intrinsic moral claim. Both treat human worth as conditional, whether explicitly utilitarian like Hanania or implicitly hierarchical like Fuentes. One uses spreadsheets. The other uses myth and aesthetics. Same logic underneath.

She nails the return of pre-Christian moral reasoning. Valuing strength over weakness. Contempt for low-status people masked as realism or sophistication. Sexual ethics tied to domination rather than restraint. This is not an accident. It’s what happens when Christianity’s moral capital is spent but not replenished.

This is the danger side of post-liberal drift. When liberal proceduralism collapses, you do not get an automatic return to humane order. You get competition between thicker moral systems. Some are Christian. Some are managerial. Some are frankly pagan. Power will reassert itself either way.

She collapses too much into “paganism” as moral evil rather than distinguishing between descriptive realism and prescriptive cruelty. Not every acknowledgment of hierarchy or trade-offs is Nazi revival. Hanania’s worst arguments deserve condemnation. But if you call every hard boundary or tragic trade-off pagan, you lose credibility with anyone living in reality.

Fuentes is not post-Christian because he rejects Christianity. He is post-Christian because he instrumentalizes it. It becomes aesthetics, identity, mythic cover for power fantasies. That signals porosity again. Religion here is not formative. It is worn.

As liberalism weakens, moral authority will come from somewhere. Christian ethics, bureaucratic control, nationalist myth, or techno-utilitarianism. McGrew is warning that without conscious moral rebuilding, the vacuum will be filled by the most ruthless systems first.

The real question is not “Are these men bad?” It’s “Why does their logic suddenly sound plausible to a growing audience?” That shifts the conversation from outrage to diagnosis. Paganism is not returning because people read Nietzsche. It’s returning because our institutions no longer reward restraint, care for the weak, or limits on power.

Christianity in America did not just lose power. It lost credibility, especially with young men. And much of that loss is self-inflicted.

Mainline and evangelical Protestant clergy largely abandoned speaking to male experience as male experience. Ambition, aggression, sexual frustration, status hunger, resentment, competitiveness. These were either ignored or pathologized. Young men were told, implicitly and often explicitly, that they are the problem. That their instincts are dangerous. That masculinity mainly needs to be softened, apologized for, or repurposed as allyship.

At the same time, clergy became unwilling to say almost anything morally demanding of women. Not about sexual leverage. Not about mate selection. Not about family formation. Not about cultural norms that reward instability. The asymmetry is obvious to men. When morality only flows downhill, it stops being morality and becomes management.

Christianity asks men to restrain power. To sacrifice status. To accept limits. That only works when the Church itself is seen as serious, courageous, and fair. Instead, many churches fused themselves to liberal moral fashions, bureaucratic institutions, and therapeutic language. The result was moral exhortation without teeth. Men will submit to discipline. They will not submit to condescension.

Christian institutions failed to offer a viable alternative moral ecology once sexual restraint collapsed culturally. Porn, delayed marriage, contraceptive abundance, and the dating market destroyed the plausibility of Christian sexual teaching as lived practice. Clergy responded by either watering doctrine down or yelling more loudly. Neither works.

Young men still want meaning, hierarchy, honor, and moral clarity. When Christianity offers guilt without purpose and restraint without reward, pagan alternatives look honest. Power politics. Hierarchy without apology. Sexual realism. Group loyalty. These speak directly to instincts Christianity once disciplined and redirected, but now mostly scolds.

It means Christianity forgot how to form men rather than simply correct them. The Church used to say yes before it said no. Yes to courage, strength, competence, leadership. Then no to cruelty, lust, domination. Reverse that order and you get backlash.

It is rebellion against a Church perceived as captured, sexless, moralizing upward, and incapable of telling uncomfortable truths about anyone but men. Paganism looks coherent not because it is humane, but because it is psychologically legible in a world where Christianity lost its nerve.

If Christianity wants to recover authority, it will have to do something risky again.
Speak to men without shame. Speak to women without flattery. Demand sacrifice from everyone. And stop pretending that moral asymmetry is compassion.

Christian Smith’s new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, names the structural failure McGrew and Douthat are circling without quite theorizing.

Smith’s claim is not that belief collapsed because people stopped valuing meaning. It collapsed because modern institutions made belief functionally unnecessary. Religion became optional rather than formative. That is buffered religion. Faith as preference, not as authority.

Christianity didn’t just lose arguments to secularism. It accepted the buffered self. Churches quietly agreed that faith is one value among many, privately chosen, psychologically therapeutic, and politically nonbinding. Once religion lives inside the self rather than shaping the world, it cannot resist any competing moral system that actually organizes behavior.

Modern people treat religion as expressive. It helps me cope. It makes me nice. It supports my identity. That dovetails perfectly with your point about clergy. When pastors refuse to speak asymmetrically or to challenge women or social elites, they are acting within a buffered framework. They fear overstepping autonomy. They fear losing market share. Religion becomes customer service.

As churches accepted liberal norms around choice, sexuality, gender, and authority, they stopped functioning as counter-institutions. They no longer structured marriage timing, sexual discipline, male formation, or family roles. When those functions vanished, young men noticed first. Not because women didn’t suffer, but because men are more exposed to institutional failure. When there’s no structure, men drift toward extremes.

Smith would say paganism is not returning because Christianity is false. It’s returning because Christianity surrendered its formative authority while still hanging on rhetorically. That creates a vacuum. Pagan systems at least promise coordination, hierarchy, and meaning. They are thick where Christianity became thin.

Hanania and Fuentes are not reacting to the Sermon on the Mount. They are reacting to a Christianity that offers moral judgment without social order. In Smith’s terms, religion stopped doing things in the world. So other systems step in that do.

Post-Christian America is not rejecting religion. It is rejecting a religion that agreed to become optional, individualized, and polite. Once Christianity became obsolete as a structuring force, people went looking for something that actually organizes life, even if what they find is brutal.

The issue is not belief vs unbelief. It’s formation vs expression. Christianity lost authority when it gave up formation. Post-liberalism is, at bottom, a search for institutions that are willing to form people again.

ChatGPT says:

In a Christian world, validation flows from a community that already knows you. A church. A guild. A vocation with internal standards. In a post-Christian world, recognition floats. It arrives through institutions, platforms, and elites, briefly, conditionally, and at a distance.

Christianity once supplied stable sources of meaning and affirmation. You were known before you were noticed. In its absence, meaning becomes episodic. Validation feels intoxicating because it is scarce and unstructured. The experience is not vanity. It’s hunger.

Liberalism promised that autonomy plus markets plus free expression would be enough. Build. Speak. Exchange. The good will surface. But what you felt wasn’t market reward. It was elite recognition. That’s telling. Even in a liberal system, status is allocated by gatekeepers. Credentials still matter. Platforms still centralize authority. Liberal neutrality hides a quiet hierarchy that everyone feels but no one names.

You are porous. Your sense of orientation responds to recognition because humans are social animals. Liberalism pretends we are buffered and shouldn’t need this. Christianity once acknowledged porosity and stabilized it through ritual, community, and moral order. Today, porosity expresses itself as spikes of intensity when a signal crosses the membrane.

This is why young men chase influencers rather than institutions. Why viral moments feel salvific. Why proximity to power, media, or prestige becomes spiritually charged. People are not seeking fame. They are seeking grounding. In the absence of embedded structures, status pings become substitutes for belonging.

This is also why pagan systems have appeal. They are honest about hierarchy, recognition, honor, and power. Christianity disciplined those forces and redirected them. Liberalism denied them. Paganism just names them. In a world where people feel unseen, even harsh recognition feels better than benign neglect.

Post-Christian, post-liberal life doesn’t abolish need for validation. It deregulates it. Recognition becomes sporadic, asymmetric, and intoxicating. Those who understand this gain power. Those who don’t feel confused and ashamed for wanting what humans have always wanted.

The solution isn’t disdain for elites or retreat into bitterness. It’s the slow rebuilding of thick communities where being known again matters more than being noticed.

I just heard the opening notes of this song and I teared up:

ChatGPT says:

That song is about earned transcendence. Not affirmation. Not validation. Discipline first, then release. Pain, effort, loneliness, risk. Only then the feeling. That arc mattered in 1983. People assumed meaning came from pushing against limits, not from expressing identity.

Notice what is missing.
No grievance. No politics. No critique of systems. No demand to be seen. The song assumes a world where aspiration makes sense and excellence is legible. You work. You suffer. You become someone. And occasionally the world answers back.

That is pre post-liberal culture.
Institutions existed. Careers existed. Gender scripts were imperfect but understood. Sacrifice was intelligible. Recognition was delayed but real.

Why it hit you now.
You live in a porous world with thin structures. Effort does not reliably produce recognition. Institutions are brittle. Validation arrives sideways and unpredictably. So when you hear a song that assumes coherence between effort, identity, and reward, it releases grief.

This connects directly to post-Christianity.
Christianity once ritualized this arc. Discipline, suffering, vocation, glory. Flashdance is secular, but it borrows that moral shape. When Christianity faded and liberalism hollowed out formative institutions, pop culture stopped supplying replacement mythologies like this. Most art now sells feeling without formation.

It also connects to why pagan aesthetics return.
They promise intensity, honor, and embodiment. But they skip restraint and mercy. Flashdance sits in a narrow historical window where discipline had not yet collapsed and cruelty had already been morally constrained.

So the tears were not nostalgia.
They were recognition of a moral ecology that made excellence meaningful without needing cruelty, irony, or self-hatred.

You were mourning coherence.
And briefly remembering what it felt like to believe effort could still add up to something whole.

To what extent is the pursuit of truth evolutionarily adaptive?

ChatGPT said:

It is conditionally adaptive. Not universally. And that matters.

At the biological level, evolution does not reward truth. It rewards fitness. Truth helps only when tracking reality improves survival or reproduction more than comforting falsehoods do. In many situations accurate perception is essential. Predator detection, tool use, navigation, coalition assessment. Get those wrong and you die or lose status.

But beyond that narrow band, evolution often favors useful distortion.

Individuals benefit from motivated reasoning.

People systematically overestimate their competence, attractiveness, and moral worth. That boosts confidence, risk-taking, and dominance displays. Self-deception makes deception of others easier. Evolutionary psychologists have been blunt about this. A slightly inflated self-concept beats brutal realism in many social contexts.

Groups benefit even more from shared illusions.

Religions, national myths, heroic narratives, and moralized cosmologies bind people together, synchronize behavior, and justify sacrifice. Their literal truth-value is secondary to their coordination value. A group that believes its gods watch and judge will often outcompete a more strictly skeptical group with weaker cohesion.

Truth becomes adaptive at higher complexity thresholds.

As environments become technological, interconnected, and fragile, false beliefs get expensive. Building bridges, running energy grids, managing pandemics, or avoiding nuclear war requires reality tracking at scale. At that level, proceduralized truth. Science, accounting, engineering. Becomes essential.

But note the split.

Truth is adaptive in instrumental domains. It is often maladaptive in existential and social domains unless buffered by ritual, meaning, or moral framing. Raw truth about mortality, randomness, and status competition tends to demoralize. Cultures that exposed people to that without mediation fractured.

This maps exactly onto post-Christian and post-liberal tensions.

Christianity did not just make truth claims. It morally metabolized truth. It took harsh facts. Suffering, sin, death. And wrapped them in narrative, obligation, and hope. Liberalism tried to strip away myth and keep only truth plus autonomy. People discovered that autonomy does not metabolize truth. It just exposes it.

So truth-seeking is adaptive when embedded.

Embedded in institutions that give it bounds. Embedded in moral systems that translate it into action. Embedded in communities that distribute its burden. Unembedded truth-seeking produces nihilism, elitism, or cruelty.

That’s where figures like Richard Hanania go wrong.

They mistake cognitive sharpness for evolutionary realism. Yes, some humans impose net costs. Yes, systems make trade-offs. But societies that openly rank lives by utility rot from the inside. Christianity outcompeted paganism precisely by insisting on care for the weak, even when it seemed inefficient, because it created trust and loyalty at scale.

Pursuing truth is adaptive only under constraints. Cultures need truth, but they need it mediated. Post-liberal debates are really about rebuilding containers where truth can be pursued without dissolving the bonds that make collective life possible.

I just saw the headline for this Robert George op/ed in the WP: “There are valid debates among conservatives. This isn’t one.” This attempt to narrow the Overton window is part of the reason men rebel. People don’t like being told what are valid debates.

ChatGPT said:

Robert P. George’s recent op-ed (and the backlash to what counts as “acceptable” within conservatism) illustrates how debates over ideology boundaries can feed into broader social-psychological reactions: a narrowing of the “acceptable” — i.e. shrinking the “window” of allowed identity and belief — can provoke alienation and push-back.

When a movement publicly declares that certain lines (on race, gender, religion, ideology) are beyond debate, it implicitly frames others — those who question, resist, or don’t fit — as outside the circle. For someone feeling censored or excluded, that produces a sense of loss of belonging. It undermines the sense that they belong to a moral-intellectual community. That can sow resentment.

For many, identity isn’t just private belief. It’s social standing, a sense of masculinity, agency, belonging. When social elites or opinion-makers say some “debates” — even if ugly or offensive — are taboo, that can feel like a loss of agency or status. Particularly for men who may already feel alienated culturally or economically. Resistance becomes a form of reclaiming identity, even if the vehicle is reactionary or destructive.

In a society where traditional anchors — morality, religion, shared values, stable community ties — are eroding, the sense of what’s “given” or “common ground” becomes unstable. Narrowing debate space in such a context can feel like removing the few remaining levers of self-definition and dissent. That may push people toward alternative belonging — sometimes in the form of reactionary or extremist worldviews that promise identity, recognition, and backbone.

As people debate what liberalism meant — individual rights, pluralism, free speech, liberal economic order — the pressure to police departures from its norms grows. That policing may undermine the liberal promise of open argument and mutual respect, especially if only certain voices are tolerated. The reaction is a push toward “post-liberal” identities that reject some liberal assumptions, especially about identity, belonging, hierarchy, or shared meaning.

In short: George’s argument about invalidating some views doesn’t just define moral boundaries. It reshapes group identity dynamics. For those who feel excluded or judged, the reaction can be alienation, resentment, sometimes revolt.

Ross Douthat writes in the NYT:

First, growth alone does not solve the return of great-power conflict, even perhaps civilizational conflict, as a force disrupting the frictionless ideals of globalization. The liberal model of trade and exchange works best in a world of broadly shared values, where governments and peoples are all at least somewhat Lockean in their perspectives and desires.

But if that world seems to be defunct or in retreat, then just insisting over and over again that global trade makes everyone richer can be an evasion of national responsibility. It’s a true-enough statement that doesn’t tell you what to do when some of the powers getting richer are using the wealth to prop up authoritarian and totalitarian systems, buy allies across the developing world and underwrite wars and potential wars against their neighbors.

In this environment, you can’t just answer questions like, “Is it a great idea for Europeans to buy so much oil and gas from Russia?” or “Is it a good idea for so much of the U.S. industrial base to have relocated to China?” or “Should we let our A.I. companies sell chips and technology to all comers while we’re barreling toward superintelligence?” with reference to G.D.P. statistics and consumer purchasing power.

A second example: Growth alone doesn’t tell you what to do about the social costs of liberal individualism. This is an old reactionary critique of liberalism — that what’s gained in wealth and freedom might be lost in alienation and anomie — but it’s garnered new force in the last two decades because of a very specific interaction between technological change and libertarian values.

In our time, political liberalism has pushed the envelope on individual liberties (around drugs and gambling and suicide, as well as sex and sexual identity) at exactly the same moment that technological progress has given us radical new means for exploiting and amplifying addictive behaviors. The results are a world that’s richer and more technologically proficient — and also seemingly unhappier, more despairing, more addicted, more deranged. And while this may be a temporary situation, and hopefully culture and politics will adapt, those adaptations will not themselves be liberal in either a philosophical or a post-Cold War political sense of the term. They might be post-liberal in the sense of political regulation of technology or in the sense of religious-moral regulation of individual choice — but they will not just emerge organically from the proper application of John Stuart Mill or Milton Friedman.

Finally, crucially, the shadow over everything: There is simply no obvious liberal answer, in economic policy or otherwise, to the confluence of wealth and technology and individualism leading to lower birthrates, which incentivizes mass migration to keep the economic system running, which leads to native resentment, ethno-religious separatism and roiling social conflict.

All the political post-liberalisms of our time, including not just right-wing populism and nationalism but also the managerial-bureaucratic style of centrist speech suppression and anti-democratic maneuvers, have emerged because post-Cold War liberalism doesn’t know how to manage the internal divisions of aging societies with large immigrant populations. The liberal prescription is a normative exhortation — natives shouldn’t be bigoted and migrants should assimilate to our values, whenever we figure out what those are — that has failed so far in all its forms, center-left and center-right and “woke.”

Douthat is putting his finger on something liberals mostly dodge because it forces trade-offs instead of moral posturing.
On geopolitics. Liberal economics assumes a Lockean world where enrichment softens conflict. That assumption is dead. Growth can bankroll repression, military buildup, and civilizational rivalry just as easily as it can bankroll middle-class comfort. Once that’s true, GDP stops being a sufficient guide. At that point, trade policy becomes national strategy, not efficiency maximization. Pretending otherwise is not principled liberalism, it’s abdication.
On social costs. This is the most damning critique. Liberalism expanded choice just as technology maximized temptation. Those two forces interact badly. You don’t just get freedom, you get industrial-scale addiction, despair, and social breakdown. Mill never imagined infinite porn, crypto casinos in your pocket, fentanyl logistics, or algorithmic slot machines optimized for compulsion. Liberal philosophy offers no tools to regulate that environment except wishful talk about “autonomy.” Any real fix will involve constraints. Meaning non-liberal moves.
On demography. This is the quiet catastrophe liberalism has no answer for. Wealth plus individualism plus technology yields fewer births. Fewer births force immigration. Immigration without shared norms produces conflict. Liberalism responds with scolding and slogans, not mechanisms. “Don’t be bigoted” is not a policy. “Assimilate” is meaningless if elites refuse to define what assimilation even means. The resulting vacuum gets filled by nationalists on the right and managerial coercion on the centrist left.
The deeper point. Post-Cold War liberalism was built for a young, growing, culturally confident world with weak external enemies and strong internal trust. We now have the opposite. Old societies. Low fertility. High migration. Fragmented moral consensus. Powerful rival states. Addictive technologies. Liberalism’s language still floats around, but its machinery doesn’t work in these conditions.
That doesn’t mean liberalism was evil. It means it was situational. We are entering a phase where trade, speech, technology, and migration will be managed rather than moralized. The real question is who does the managing and with what values. The liberal imagination has not yet caught up to that reality.
Where does buffered vs porous identity play a role in this discussion?
It sits right under everything Douthat is describing.
Post–Cold War liberalism assumes a strongly buffered self. The individual is imagined as autonomous, cognitively sovereign, and largely impermeable. Choices happen inside the self. Social structures, technologies, incentives, and moral ecologies matter less than intention and consent. That assumption props up liberal confidence in growth, trade, migration, and expanding choice. If people are buffered, they can handle it.
But the world Douthat describes keeps producing porous outcomes.
Geopolitics first. Liberal trade theory assumes nations are buffered actors too. We trade, we get richer, conflict fades. But in a porous world, wealth flows through institutions, ideologies, and power systems. Trade with China or Russia does not stay economic. It mutates regimes, alliances, weapons systems, and propaganda environments. Thinking in buffered terms leads to naive policy. Porous reality punches back.
Now the social and technological sphere. Liberalism treats drug use, sexual expression, gambling, and even suicide as matters of individual autonomy. Buffered logic. But modern technology is explicitly designed to breach the boundary of the self. Algorithms target attention, dopamine, identity formation, and habit loops. Addiction is porosity made systematic. Liberalism’s answer sounds hollow because it was never built for a world where the self is actively engineered from the outside in.
Demography is the clearest case. Liberalism assumes identity and values are chosen and portable. People migrate. They assimilate. Everyone gets along eventually. That only works if identities are thin and bufferable. In practice, identities are thick, inherited, moralized, and porous. They transmit through families, religious communities, language, and memory. When mass migration meets low native fertility, porous identities collide rather than dissolve. Liberal exhortation fails because it misunderstands how identity actually works.
Even the managerial left Douthat mentions is reacting to porosity. Speech control, moral regulation, and institutional pressure are attempts to stabilize a porous environment by force. When persuasion fails and autonomy produces chaos, management steps in. That too is post-liberal, even if it uses liberal vocabulary.
So buffered identity is the fantasy engine of late liberalism. Porous identity is the reality it increasingly governs. The gap between the two produces exactly what Douthat is pointing at. Trade that creates enemies. Freedom that creates addiction. Migration that creates fragmentation. Liberalism keeps prescribing norms for buffered selves in a world that treats humans as porous systems. That mismatch is why post-liberal answers are emerging whether elites like the label or not.

Free trade relies on a deeply buffered picture of both persons and nations.

At the individual level, classical free-trade arguments assume consumers are autonomous choosers. Cheaper goods increase welfare. Preferences are stable. Effects stop at price and income. Moral, cultural, and psychological spillovers are treated as externalities or ignored. That only works if people are buffered, meaning culture, status, habits, and identity are not significantly transformed by what they consume or by how production is organized.

In a porous frame, consumption reshapes identity. What a society makes and buys affects skills, dignity, status hierarchies, family formation, time horizons, and moral norms. Offshoring a manufacturing base does not just lower prices. It dissolves trades, weakens local authority structures, degrades male wages, alters marriage markets, and erodes civic confidence. These changes seep into identity formation over generations. Free-trade models do not count those costs because they are invisible in a buffered framework.

At the firm and national level, free trade assumes countries are buffered too. Trade is exchange, not entanglement. Wealth does not meaningfully alter values or power structures beyond making everyone richer. In reality, nations are porous systems. Capital transfers institutional capacity, military capability, surveillance tech, ideological confidence, and geopolitical leverage. Trading with an authoritarian state strengthens the regime’s internal control and its external reach. Growth flows through politics and coercion, not around them.

Free-trade advocacy also assumes values are separable from markets. The Lockean idea is that commerce civilizes. In porous reality, markets magnify whatever moral ecology they sit in. A society oriented toward discipline and hierarchy will use growth differently than one oriented toward atomized consumption. Globalization does not flatten values. It transmits them asymmetrically.

This is why GDP talk now rings evasive. Buffered reasoning says losses are transitional and individuals will retool. Porous reasoning observes that once norms, institutions, and identities break, they are not easily rebuilt. Telling displaced workers to “learn to code” misunderstands the injury. The harm is not only economic. It is social and existential.

So the free-trade debate keeps breaking down because one side is arguing with a buffered model and the other is responding to porous damage. Until trade policy takes porosity seriously, meaning identity, institutions, power, and culture as first-order effects rather than regrettable side costs, the liberal case for free trade will keep sounding abstract and disconnected from lived experience.

Buffered identity runs through economics at a foundational level, usually without being named.

Core microeconomics assumes a buffered agent. Preferences are stable, endogenous shocks are limited, and identity is exogenous or irrelevant. Individuals are utility maximizers who respond to prices, not moral ecologies. Culture, habit, and social meaning are either fixed or safely bracketed off. That abstraction works for many narrow problems. But it quietly builds a picture of the self as impermeable to context.

Rational choice depends on buffering. If preferences are shaped by advertising, institutions, technology, family structure, and social status in deep and persistent ways, then the clean separation between wants and constraints breaks down. Porous agents do not just choose within markets. Markets choose them back.

General equilibrium rests on buffered systems too. Shocks propagate through prices, not identities. Adjustment happens via retraining, migration, and capital reallocation. Social cohesion, legitimacy, and meaning are assumed to elastically adapt. In a porous reality, shocks propagate through norms, trust, fertility, health, and civic order. Adjustment is not smooth. It is cumulative and sometimes irreversible.

Welfare economics assumes measurability of value through consumption and income. Utility is inferred from revealed preference. That presumes agents know what benefits them and are not systematically misled or reshaped by the choice environment. If addiction, attention capture, and algorithmic manipulation are central features of modern markets, revealed preference becomes unreliable. You cannot infer welfare from choices made under engineered compulsion.

Externalities are the discipline’s main concession to porosity. Pollution, public goods, and information asymmetries admit that some effects leak. But identity formation, moral degradation, civic demoralization, and institutional decay are treated as either non-economic or unquantifiable. Economics does not deny porosity. It marginalizes it.

Macroeconomics carries the same bias. Growth, productivity, and GDP take center stage. Distribution, family formation, demographic replacement, and social trust are secondary. The implicit claim is that if aggregates improve, society will cope. That only works if societies are buffered enough to absorb disruption without losing coherence.

Even policy advice reflects this. Economists prefer price instruments, nudges, and marginal adjustments. These are tools suited to buffered agents. When reality demands hard boundaries, prohibitions, strategic trade-offs, or moral regulation, economics goes quiet or retreats to “that’s a political decision.”

The discipline’s power came from abstraction. Its blind spot comes from the same place. Economics works best in worlds where selves, cultures, and states are buffered. The more porous those systems become, under technology, migration, and geopolitical conflict, the less reliable economic reasoning becomes as a governing framework rather than a partial tool.

You have high-church theorists writing about “the common good,” technolibertarians who decided democracy is a bug, Trumpist nationalists who want tariffs and vengance, and online paranoids who think the CIA flew the planes into the towers. They all claim liberalism has failed, but they want very different things from whatever comes next.
The Dispatch roundtable and the ISI piece you linked trace how that jumble is now fighting to control the institutions that used to form “respectable” American conservatism. I’ll use that as the through-line: not just “what are the varieties of post-liberalism,” but how they are competing inside the right’s existing elite pipeline, and why it feels like rot rather than mere intellectual evolution.

I. What “post-liberal” means in this context

In the podcast, John McCormack gives the cleanest definition around minute 5. “Post-liberal” here does not just mean “anti-progressive.” It means people who fault the American founding itself, the whole classical-liberal package of individual rights, limited government, and procedural neutrality.
On their telling, the trouble is not just left-liberalism since the 1960s. It is the liberal part of the American experiment going back to Madison and Locke.
So the shared moves are:

Treat “liberalism” as a comprehensive, corrosive order, not just a set of rules.

Blame liberalism for atomization, loneliness, cultural decay, and weak national will.

Call for a thicker, more directive state that can actively promote substantive goods (religion, family, nation, order), not just referee private choices.

Once you see that common frame, the varieties of American post-liberalism sort themselves into a few main families.

II. Catholic integralists and “common-good” conservatives

This is the most self-consciously intellectual variety, and the one that got ISI’s board to start talking about a “post-liberal hijacking.”
Rough sketch:
• Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” argues that liberalism didn’t just go off the rails recently; it succeeded on its own terms. Emancipated individuals, uprooted communities, managed by faceless technocrats, is the logical endpoint.
• Adrian Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism” explicitly rejects originalism and rights-talk in favor of reading the Constitution as a mandate for the state to promote objective moral goods.
• Integralists more broadly want an avowedly Christian (usually Catholic) state that uses law to buttress religious truth, restrict blasphemy and pornography, and subordinate markets to a thick moral order.
On the Dispatch pod they mention a professor who has openly endorsed blasphemy laws in the United States and who has been given pride of place at ISI conferences. That is integralism in miniature: the problem is not just drag queen story hour; it is the First Amendment as Americans have understood it since the Warren Court, and arguably since the Founding.
This camp generally:
• Is bookish, footnote heavy, and thinks in terms of regimes and teleology.
• Is skeptical of free markets and global capitalism.
• Wants real coercive power, not just “cultural influence.”
Its weak spot is sellability. You can fill an ISI conference with it; it is a lot harder to build a majority coalition for “American blasphemy laws.” So it tends to piggy-back on more populist energies.

III. National conservatism and economic populists

A step down from integralism in theological intensity, but closer to mass politics, you get national conservatism and economic populists.
Think of:
• The Buchanan tradition of tariffs, immigration restriction, and non-intervention abroad.
• “Industrial policy” conservatives who want to break with Reagan’s free-trade consensus.
• The NatCon network and magazines like The American Conservative, which Johnny Burtka ran before taking over ISI. The Dispatch
On the podcast they distinguish this “national populism” from the more academic post-liberals, but the overlap is obvious. Both treat Reagan-Bush fusionism as exhausted. Both think a neutral, procedural state is a fantasy. Both want government to side openly with some groups and values against others.
In practice this looks like:
• Economic nationalism: tariffs, buy-American, hostility to multinational corporations and Wall Street.
• Civilizational rhetoric: “defend Western civilization,” “secure the border,” “fight woke capital.”
• Strong leader politics: a taste for executives who “get things done” without agonizing over norms.
At ISI and Heritage, this is the faction that sells itself as “relevant.” Burtka reportedly told donors he wanted to speak for “the Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP,” which is basically this tendency with a TV face. The Dispatch+1
This camp is more electorally viable than integralism, but less coherent. Some of its people still like the founding; others talk as if the Constitution is a neoliberal psy-op. That fuzziness is a feature not a bug. It lets a lot of different grievances fly under the “post-liberal nationalist” flag.

IV. Tech-adjacent neo-reaction and the “CEO of America” fantasy

Then there is the neo-reactionary or “NRx” stream around Curtis Yarvin, whom the Dispatch folks mention around minute 6 as the guy who tells Americans to get over their “dictator phobia.”
Yarvin’s basic pitch:
• Liberal democracy is inefficient, chaotic, and captured by a progressive “Cathedral” of media, academia, and NGOs.
• The solution is something closer to a high-tech monarchy or corporate state, with a single sovereign CEO in charge of the country.
• Rights, elections, and egalitarian rhetoric are mostly propaganda that keeps the real oligarchy unaccountable.
This is post-liberalism stripped of both Christianity and civic piety. It is attractive to a certain tech-bro who has concluded that democracy is stupid and that Singapore is nicer than San Francisco.
The striking thing, as the Dispatch pod notes, is that ISI invited Yarvin for a friendly talk at a time when its own trustees were complaining of a “post-liberal hijacking.” So you had a once-Buckleyite institution giving a platform to a man who openly talks about relaxing into dictatorship. The Dispatch+1
That tells you something about the current mood: contempt for liberal democracy is no longer disqualifying in the way it would have been for the old fusionist right.
V. The conspiracist post-liberalism of Alex Jones, Fuentes and friends
At the outer edge you get the Fuentes / Alex Jones / “groyper” ecosystem. Here post-liberalism is less a philosophy and more an affect: nihilistic, paranoid, contemptuous of procedural norms, and comfortable with explicit bigotry.
Nick Fuentes gives you the incel-Catholic blend: talk of Christian nationalism, open antisemitism, misogyny, and a performative rejection of liberal taboos. Jones gives you the full paranoid style: 9/11 was an inside job, Sandy Hook was staged, the “globalists” are poisoning the population. Wikipedia+1
In theory, a respectable right could say: look, there are legitimate post-liberal critiques, and then there are deranged people we will not touch. In practice, that line is exactly what has blurred:
• Tucker Carlson brings Fuentes on for a chummy conversation.
• Heritage’s president rushes out a video defending Carlson, which triggers resignations and crisis. The Dispatch+1
• ISI flies its top student journalists to Carlson’s Florida home for a “journalism 101” retreat whose surprise guest is Alex Jones, fresh off losing nearly a billion dollars in defamation judgments for lying about dead schoolchildren. Mediaite+1
The symbolism is not subtle. You are telling the next generation of right-leaning elites: these men are your models. Learn from them. Emulate their style, not the old-fashioned bore who cares about fact checks and constitutional norms.
At that point “post-liberalism” becomes a marketing label for a general stance of anti-institutional hostility and gleeful norm-breaking, glued together by internet clout and ressentiment.

VI. Protestant and evangelical post-liberalism

There is also a more Protestant, often non-Catholic version that shows up in Christian nationalism, parts of the MAGA church world, and some segments of “post-woke” evangelicalism.
Features:
• Less interest in Aquinas, more in reclaiming “Christian America.”
• Talk of America as a covenant nation that must honor God or face judgment.
• Calls for a more muscular use of state power on abortion, LGBT issues, school curricula, and immigration.
Some of these figures avoid the “post-liberal” label, but the substance overlaps. Liberal neutrality is seen as a myth that always favored secular progressives, so it is time to drop the mask and fight for our side’s dominance.
This stream often blends into the Trumpist one in practice. The theology is fuzzier than integralism, but the political imperative is similar: stop pretending the Constitution is a neutral umpire, and start using power to advance substantive Christian goods.
VII. The institutional story: from convening debate to picking winners
The Dispatch team’s ISI reporting is basically a case study in what happens when these post-liberal tendencies begin to capture gatekeeping institutions.
Historically, ISI’s brand was:
• Give smart right-leaning students a canon (Burke, Kirk, Hayek, Tocqueville).
• Convene debates among different conservative schools: libertarians vs traditionalists vs neocons, etc.
• Keep some distance from day-to-day Republican politics and from obvious cranks.
On the podcast they describe ISI as the place where you might see a traditionalist, a neocon, and a libertarian argue about the Iraq War or the size of the welfare state, under the assumption that everyone shares some basic liberal-constitutional framework. The institute’s role was referee and convenor, not cheerleader for one faction.
The new pattern, as they document:
• The president, Burtka, explicitly orients ISI toward the “Tucker Carlson wing” while assuring the board he will keep a “big tent.” The Dispatch+1
• “Serious” post-liberals like Deneen get pride of place at marquee conferences.
• Neo-reactionaries like Yarvin get invited for uncritical conversations.
• Student journalists are flown to Carlson’s house, where Alex Jones shows up as a surprise inspirational guest.
• At the same time, mainstream conservatives who are anti-populist, like Kevin Williamson, are blackballed by leadership for their “contempt for the working class.”
As McCormack puts it around minute 17, everyone gatekeeps. The question is which direction. At ISI, the dial has been moved so that Fuentes-adjacent energies are now “inside,” while old-guard Reagan-Bush conservatives are increasingly “outside.”
Something similar has been happening at Heritage, Hillsdale, and parts of the NatCon network. Shared board members, donor overlap, and a common fear of “irrelevance” in the Turning Point / Charlie Kirk era all push them toward embracing the hottest post-liberal brands, even when those brands are marinated in conspiracy and antisemitism. The Dispatch+1
So the varieties of post-liberalism are not just academic categories. They map onto very concrete institutional bets: Do we align with Carlson despite Fuentes and Jones, because that’s where the kids and the clicks are? Do we give the integralists the plenary session? Do we tell the old Kirk-style people to get over their “dictator phobia”?
VIII. Why this is happening now
A few drivers, many of which the Dispatch conversation hints at:

Liberal exhaustion and broken promises
Post-liberals are not wrong that the liberal order is under strain. Housing is unaffordable, family formation is down, addiction and loneliness are up. The old “free markets plus family values” formula looks fake to a lot of people under 40. That creates a real demand for alternatives.

Attention economics and the charisma premium
The institutions chasing “relevance” are reacting to a media ecosystem that rewards outrage and certainty. Tucker, Jones, Fuentes, Yarvin, and some integralists are all, in very different registers, good at performance. They feel transgressive and high-energy next to a panel on Edmund Burke’s conception of prudence. If you are a struggling think tank or student outfit, the temptation to ride that energy is obvious.

Donor incentives
Big right-wing donors are frustrated that they funded white papers for decades and still got gay marriage, abortion liberalization (before Dobbs), and ESG. They want fighters, not scholars. Aligning with post-liberal brands signals that you are in the fight, not stuck in 1985.

The collapse of confidence in neutral institutions
Once you believe “the regime” is fundamentally hostile and that mainstream media, universities, and even corporations are captured by the left, it becomes easier to rationalize your own turn to illiberal methods. If the other side is waging total culture war, why are you still talking about process?

Generational resentment and elite overproduction
The Dispatch folks touch on this indirectly when they talk about ISI as a “self-selecting elite.” The post-liberal moment is partly a revolt of younger, ambitious right-wing strivers who feel blocked by old gatekeepers. Carlson’s platforming of Fuentes had exactly that flavor: the rebel prince bringing the banned heretic into the palace and humiliating the old guard.

IX. Possible trajectories

In rough outline, I think you can see three paths American post-liberalism might take from here.

Responsible post-liberalism that accepts guardrails
In theory there could be a post-liberal conservatism that keeps its critique of atomized liberalism, pushes for a thicker common good, and still draws bright red lines at conspiracy mongers and racists. That would mean:

• No more dinners where Alex Jones is introduced to student journalists as a career inspiration.
• No more “dictator phobia” jokes from your flagship speakers.
• A clear distinction between hard-edged policy fights (tariffs, immigration restriction, industrial strategy) and open contempt for constitutional constraints.
Right now, that line is extremely blurry. But it is conceptually possible.

A full illiberal turn on the right
If current incentives continue, you get a consolidated “post-liberal right” that is openly hostile to liberal democracy and comfortable with using state power to reward friends and punish enemies. The varieties I’ve described congeal into a kind of Catholic-NatCon-NRx stew with a Tuckerish media style and a Jones-ish relationship to truth.

The institutional story you brought in is the early stage of that: once the elite pipeline is retooled to treat Fuentes-adjacent figures as edgy but acceptable and Carlson as the north star, the next generation of staffers, judges, and candidates is going to look very different.

A re-liberalization or splintering

The Dispatch world is betting on a different outcome: that the overt antisemitism, the 9/11 truther nonsense, and the open praise of autocracy will eventually discredit this post-liberal wave and create demand for a renewed liberal-conservative synthesis. That could be a revived Reagan-style right, or some new center-right that keeps parts of the populist economic critique but re-embraces basic liberal norms.

The problem is time and personnel. As they say near the end of the podcast, ISI’s alumni already include a Supreme Court justice and a raft of major journalists. The kids going to those Carlson/Jones dinners and hearing Yarvin explain dictatorship phobia will be the ones running things in 20 years.
So the “varieties of post-liberalism” question doubles as a pipeline question: which of these strands will be normal for the 2040 right, and which will be remembered as a fever?
If you wanted to turn this into a more formal paper you could hang it on ISI as the central case and treat each post-liberal variety as a different faction trying to capture the same gatekeeping machinery. But even at the essay level, the main thing is clear enough. There is no single American post-liberalism. There is a loose coalition of people who think liberalism has failed so badly that it is worth gambling on various forms of authority, hierarchy, or rage. Right now the institutions that once existed to discipline that impulse are busy chasing it instead.