Peak Postliberalism

For the "postliberals," this is about as good as it gets

Feb 11, 2026

American postliberals are closer to power than they have ever been. For the clique of socially conservative professors whose philosophy is rooted in revulsion to America’s founding principles, there is nowhere to go but down.

If you haven’t followed the ascent of Tucker Carlson’s hand-picked vice president or the antics of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, you may never have heard of postliberalism. The simplest way to summarize postliberalism is this: imagine Bernie Sanders was Roman Catholic. Postliberals hate limited government, free markets, and individual liberty, and have a long history of saying so.

The better ruling class proffered by JD Vance and his socially conservative socialist circle is, of course, JD Vance and his circle of socially conservative socialists.

JD Vance is not Donald Trump, and cannot be expected to hold the same sway over the Republican Party. Should Vance wind up as president without turning on his postliberal fellow-travelers, the stark incompatibility of their ideas with American conservatism will render Vance even more radioactive than he already is.

In a 2023 interview, postliberal thought leader Patrick Deneen explained that the “liberal” philosophy he opposes includes the classical liberalism of the American founding:

When I say liberal I mean the political philosophy of liberalism that has a kind of, is inaugurated in the kind of social contract tradition of you know, late 17th, late 18th century Britain, and gets imported to the United States, it's articulated by our founding fathers, and then it's further developed in, kind of from its kind of classical liberal origins into its progressive liberal form.
And what makes it in some ways continuous, even though today we think of classical liberalism - what we call conservative - and progressive liberalism - progressivism - as opposites, its core similarity is the ideal of being liberated from any kind of unchosen sense of self, any unchosen inheritance, any unchosen form of identity. It's a kind of idealized form of autonomy that's pictured or imagined in the fictional, imaginary state of nature.

“We don’t need a return to the founding,” Deneen said in a 2022 Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) speech, asserting that “conservatives and Americans should undo the destruction that has been wrought by a highly tendentious and abstract understanding of America that rests on libertarian wish-casting about the founding” and instead ask, “What is the common good?”

Sometimes, Deneen criticizes the Constitution directly; more often, he accuses libertarians of duping the public into believing limited government and individual liberty are central to our national identity. But his underlying theme is always the same: Americans make bad choices, and postliberals will make us make better ones.

Although the Bible spells out clearly that salvation through faith in Jesus Christ requires a personal decision, and that a Christian serves God by choosing to do so each day, postliberals cloak their animosity toward individualism in Christian terms. Their attempts to conflate coercion and charity are complicated further by the fact that their friend JD Vance is best known for swearing at skeptics on social media, and viciously demonizing immigrants while Republican officials and Catholic bishops begged him to stop.

The vice president’s friend Rod Dreher, who chronicled Vance’s 2019 conversion to Roman Catholicism for The American Conservative, is also friends with Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Adrian Vermeule, and Chad Pecknold, the cofounders of Deneen’s “Postliberal Order” blog. Dreher and Pappin live in Hungary, where Pappin — founder of postliberal journal American Affairs, which has received $1.6M in grants from the progressive William & Flora Hewlett Foundation — runs Orban’s Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.

“Gotta say I’m not surprised to be in J.D.’s head with my pal Patrick Deneen,” Dreher wrote in response to a 2024 Politico story highlighting the vice presidential nominee’s ties to the postliberals.

Vance is a member of “the postliberal right” by his own admission, as he said at a May 2023 ISI event with Deneen celebrating Deneen’s book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future:

Like so many fringe ideologues exploiting divisions in a far larger coalition, the postliberals see themselves as the rightful rulers of a movement they openly disdain.

At his postliberal friend Sohrab Ahmari’s 2022 “Restoring a Nation” conference with Deneen, Pappin, Pecknold, and Vermeule, Vance implored his allies to prevent “Fusionism 2.0” from subsuming their “vanguard of a new Republican Party,” so they could “take the very corrupt American ruling class and replace it with something better.”

The better ruling class proffered by JD Vance and his socially conservative socialist circle is, of course, JD Vance and his circle of socially conservative socialists.

Deneen discussed his friendship with Vance in a 2025 Daily Signal interview with an editor of The American Conservative, which is a Pat Buchanan fan blog funded by the progressive Hewlett Foundation:

Although ISI (a recipient of $890,000 in Hewlett grants since 2020) and The Heritage Foundation have abandoned their own founding principles to amplify postliberalism, Deneen and his movement would be a laughingstock if Tucker Carlson had not convinced Donald Trump to pick Vance in a 2022 Senate primary and then the 2024 veepstakes.

During a September 2025 speech to The Foley Institute, Deneen admitted that his work is inspired by Marxism:

And yet as you'll see today, much of what I argue and much of the material that I have relied upon has primarily found its sources in what was once the political left. In particular, class analysis that rested on Marxist or Marxist-adjacent thinkers who once upon a time engaged in class analysis, primarily.

Listen to a few minutes of any Deneen speech, and the Marxist influence is unmistakable. In a November 2025 interview, Deneen said:

In both the literal Constitution, but more importantly, in my view, in our kind of unwritten constitution - the way we organize our lives - we have an unmixed constitution. We have a division that has led us to precisely what the classical authors warned us about, which is either despotism or civil war. And notice, that's what we tend to talk about in our politics these days. So, the solution lies, then, in an updated form of a mixed constitution. And that's where I developed or I lit upon this phrase, 'aristopopulism.'
[…]
What’s needed is not simply to tear down the current elite, but to hopefully see rise in its stead a far more excellent elite. An elite that’s going to be far more responsive and responsible toward the flourishing of the lives of ordinary people. And, you know, I use a few Marxist phrases to describe this; we’ll need some people who are traitors to their class.

“The restoration of a common good tradition in America will require a new American revolution,” Deneen said in a speech at a 2021 National Conservatism conference. “Like our first revolution, we should aim to oust the entrenched oligarchy that has now taken advantage of many of its fellow citizens, and put in their place the kind of political leaders supported by the kinds of citizens who, like our forbears, fought and founded a nation in which any liberty worthy of possessing must be advanced by and for a truly common good.”

“We must see this jointly-created, invented tradition of America as a fundamentally or solely liberal nation as a recent innovation that is in fact a departure from the actual American tradition. It is an invented tradition that has been launched in the service of a rapacious ruling class which is benefiting from its rewards,” Deneen said during the same speech:

“Some see themselves as recovering ‘original’ liberalism, embracing the notion of a limited state,” Deneen said, putting the word “original” in air quotes while next to a depiction of the Constitution in a 2021 video for Budapest-based Axioma Media:

At a 2025 National Conservatism conference, Deneen said:

Having now gone through a period in which the institutions of civil society are in a condition of profound disrepair, it is tantamount to cruelty to claim that all that is needed is more individual liberty. Our young people need assistance from the public order in order to make it easier for them to marry, to buy a house, to have children - and I’m very pleased, and gratified, and I feel not a little bit of satisfaction to see Heritage Foundation come around to a view that a few of us have been arguing for a few years. Amen. That’s really gonna help. Ya know, tweeting is one thing, but having a big institution in DC is another.

Deneen’s view that progressives and conservatives are enemies of “the common good” is shared by his Postliberal Order peers. On an October 2023 ISI podcast, Chad Pecknold called classical liberalism a poisoned well, saying:

What we conceived of as a liberal order has failed, and we’re living in a postliberal moment in which the left is no longer committed to the principles of liberalism, and in certain respects the right has sacrificed itself on the altar of freedom in such a way that it makes it look like liberalism doesn’t really have a future as such, that liberalism is something which describes the past.
[…]
Some people, conservatives especially, I think, look to the past and say, ‘Well maybe we can have a conservative recovery of liberalism. We can return to the classical sources of liberal thought, and maybe we can go to the particularly whiggish side with Edmund Burke, with Russell Kirk, with Alexis de Tocqueville, and we can kind of build the pieces of liberalism back together.’ The trouble with that vision - and I think postliberals like myself, and Patrick Deneen, who are speaking here this week - is that that’s actually part of the problem that brought us to this moment. And so, it’s a little bit like, you know, going back to the well that poisoned you. Why would you go back to the well that poisoned you?
[…]
We’re living in a moment in which there’s, I think an attempt to, for conservatives to return to what’s familiar. And, so part of it is, I think there is, in some circles there’s an attempt to take advantage of the conservative Democratic sentiment which moved for Trump, for example, as an opportunity, right? An opportunity to build a new conservative vision. And for some postliberals, if you want to use the term broadly, that means trying to take some of those themes around the common good, about, around a sort of working-class conservativism, and make it fit for the old fusion. For the old sort of William F. Buckley fusionism. And this is what I call the Fusionism 2.0 problem, trying to go back to the well but use, use, use some of the new terms of the populist shift. And I think my, my colleagues at Postliberal Order are critical of that. We’re critical of any attempt to return to what we call ‘right liberalism.’

On the same ISI podcast, Pecknold discussed how postliberals were taking over ISI and Heritage:

The major question which I think ISI is dealing with, and other leaders are dealing with, is, ‘Okay, but how do we deal with the institutions that we have? How do we deal with the real-world institutions that have legacy, that have history, that have structures, that we can’t just dissolve?’ And, and, this is, this leads to a lot of, think, complexity, in how the major legacy conservative institutions proceed. Do they proceed purely along Fusionism 2.0 lines, just get the band back together - the band that really put us in this spot? Or, or is it an attempt -- do we have genuine attempts to sort of see in our political moment, the post-Trumpian moment as one in which we have to say, ‘Okay, can we have a genuinely new political vision that is good?’
And, I think that’s where we are - at least my perception of what’s going on at ISI is ISI’s trying to discern that. How can you be a legacy institution founded in 1953 with ‘individualism’ in your title, but not actually be individualist? And I think, I think that’s a, that’s a challenge for all of our legacy conservative institutions, is, is - I know Kevin Roberts is dealing with that, and I, and I, I know that there are criticisms of that, but this, we’re in a complex time of trying to sort out who belongs in what camp.

During an October 2024 Turning Point USA speech at the University of Illinois, Pecknold said:

Conservatives are associated with preservation of community, church, tradition, family. And now, that really bad word, ‘nationalism.’ Yet in practice it’s still, conservative politics is still the politics of, what? Individual liberty. Unfettered markets. Resistance to the use of governmental power to aid community, church, tradition.
This however is only an apparent paradox. It’s not a paradox because it’s actually resolvable. Liberalism has been operative on both the left and the right politically from the very beginning. Liberals base their views upon the primacy of the individual, whether they are liberals on the right - individual liberty - or whether they are liberals on the left - my body, my choice.

Although they detest progressive views on social issues, postliberals are happy to work with progressives on areas of agreement — a lengthy list that includes welfare spending, labor, trade, and regulatory policy, and is the obvious explanation for the Hewlett Foundation’s generosity toward the postliberal cause. As Pecknold said in his October 2024 University of Illinois speech:

The promise of postliberal politics manifests itself in many cross-aisle ideas about a range of issues: unions and reindustrializing the country. Rethinking family policy in a politically realistic way, which results in more babies and a homegrown future worth defending. Making our cities truly beautiful and habitable for all, rather than just some Americans.

During a Q&A session following his speech, Pecknold disputed an audience member’s assertion that individual liberty “has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else,” saying:

Do you believe that? I used to believe that in the ‘90s. That was the thing we said in the ‘90s, that - we used to say that about capitalism, capitalism’s great because it lifted more people out of poverty. If capitalism does this, why do our, why do we have tent cities in the middle of our greatest cities? Why do we have this problem, if capitalism raises everybody’s boats or if liberalism raises everybody’s - why?

At the Restoring a Nation conference in 2022, Pecknold said, “there can be no serious right-liberal response to the threat of left-liberal materialism. There can be no serious right-liberal response because you can’t respond to left-liberalism with liberalism. This is why we describe our predicament, in the descriptive mode, as ‘postliberal.’”

After calling for laws banning businesses from operating on Saturdays (or Sundays? or maybe both?), Pecknold told the Restoring a Nation conference:

And the state, in making such laws sets a limit - itself must set the limit, the state itself must set the limit on a burned-out materialism that leaves us sad on porches, waiting for things that we should not wait for. Reducing us all to the cogs of capital machinery is not what we should hope for.

“The best way to protect individuals from the abuses of private interest is not to create other associations of private interest,” Pecknold said during his Restoring a Nation speech. “The best way to protect the person from the abuses of private interests - from the abuses of personal and corporate greed - is to think about the good of the whole, not the competing rights and interests of the parties.”

At the same 2022 conference, Deneen proposed sweeping industrial policy in the form of “a new Marshall Plan for the United States.”

Responding to a question about postliberal views on labor unions and industrial policy after his September 2025 Foley Institute speech, Deneen summarized how Vance and Heritage are co-opting the conservative movement to defeat libertarianism and advance postliberalism:

One party increasingly is the not liberal party, which includes such things as economic interventions in the marketplace in the form, of course, tariffs, and manufacturing investments and so forth, and I think, certainly if we listen to JD Vance when he was senator, is pro-union and seeks to break up monopolies. Now, that's, that's a remarkable phenomenon, to have that as, you know, the one-time Republican Party now one heartbeat away from the president.
[…]
Heritage Foundation, which was founded as Ronald Reagan's foundation in the 1980s, has, just in the last couple of weeks declared that it will be devoting massive amount of its resources to developing family policies, family-friendly policies, how do you increase marriage, and how do you increase child births in the country. That's a revolution in thinking on the right. So I think it's in these areas in some ways where you could say, restraining the libertarianism of the marketplace, and correcting the libertarianism of the social sphere is where this New Right in a sense is, its trajectory lies.

Deneen made a similar point about how postliberal central planning would benefit labor unions during a September 2023 podcast interview where he said he “would be open to” ending Indiana’s right-to-work law, which lets workers opt out of paying labor unions:

In an October 2020 interview on Yoram Hazony’s NatConTalk podcast, Deneen said “there's a place for a vigorous state,” suggesting “we’re at a point now where you may need a certain degree of state power to restrain some of this concentration of economic power.”

In a March 2019 speech hosted by First Things, Deneen said:

The recent interference of corporations in the form of the threat of economic devastation in the democratic processes in states such as Indiana, Arizona, Arkansas, and North Carolina should not be brooked. Any economic institution with sufficient power to bring economic ruin upon a state should be severely curtailed in the name of the common good. The Left used to believe this, but they went silent when corporations like Apple were bullying my home state of Indiana.
This focus should be true of those semi-private institutions like the NCAA who use their privileged position and their tax advantaged status to circumvent the will of somewhere-people. Political leaders whose position is owed to such people should dispel any nostalgic views about the free market and free enterprise, instead recognizing that such economic institutions are seeking to shape a social order that is amenable to the oligarchic class. A Machiavellian assertion of popular tumult should be directed at either preventing such abuses of financial power, or seeking to dismantle such institutions.

The vice president is surrounded by socially conservative socialists who want to seize the means of production to own the liberal oligarchy. What could go wrong?

Jason Hart

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