Day: December 4, 2025

Postliberalism has been a hot topic recently on social media and in subsequent web-based publications. Originally, the discussion focused on the level of responsibility postliberals bore for the rise of “groypers,” or the young neo-Nazi movement associated with Nick Fuentes. David French insisted that there was a direct relationship, affirming on X that postliberals, “taught the groypers that the classical liberalism of the founding was a fool’s game, and that the way forward is through punching and attacking, through insults, derision, and mockery.” He concluded, “Once you’ve demolished respect for liberal democracy and demolished any real value in rectitude and character in public life, it’s a short trip to nihilism and fascism.”

Opposing this view was Michael Brendan Dougherty, who argued that there is no clear definition to distinguish “postliberals” and that there are no real examples of postliberal states to examine for comparisons. Joining him was Ross Douthat, although he made a somewhat strange distinction between intellectual and political postliberalism. Sohrab Ahmari also chimed in to say that postliberalism is defined by its commitment to the common good, which also therefore makes it “fiercely and consistently opposed the politics of race and IQ.” 

Jonah Goldberg then stepped in with an extended piece on the subject at The Dispatch, which helpfully defined postliberalism for Dougherty:

A postliberal is someone who believes that liberalism was either a mistake from the beginning (they heap a lot of scorn on poor John Locke), or—like Marx—argues as an objective observation that it is a spent force in need of replacement. The specifics of what that new replacement order should look like are often hard to find, and even when some give it a shot, I haven’t seen any that aren’t exceedingly vague, aspirational, platitudinous, or too narrow to be the basis of a consensus (I am open to correction).

His definition is broad enough to include the Catholic postliberals among white nationalists, national conservatives, and other groups that Goldberg opposes. The point is not that they oppose liberalism for the same reasons or envision the same alternatives, but that the term “postliberal” is more a way of identifying one’s factional affiliation. Oddly enough, leading postliberal Adrian Vermeule agrees with him on that point at least, calling postliberalism a “negative category” in which “all members of the genus reject the central premises of liberalism.” Therefore, Vermeule seems to set himself against Ahmari and Dougherty, and with Goldberg. What is one to make of all this?

Postliberals want the term “postliberalism” to remain vague, so that debates about it will center on definitions rather than the ideas and their implications. Debating definitions is much pleasanter than acknowledging that postliberalism opens up its adherents to a tradition that has historically embraced antisemitism and made common cause with fascism and Nazism.

What Is Postliberalism?

Establishing clear definitions can be important, but often defenders of postliberalism revel in vagueness, as a safeguard against serious discussion of their movement’s many defects. Let it suffice, then, to accept a definition from two authorities. The first comes from the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre. This past October, Cardinal Pierre penned a pastoral correction to those advocating postliberalism, defining it as the following:

the so-called post-liberal movement seeks to transcend the liberal order, denouncing the insufficiency of individualism and the corrosive power of deregulated markets, and proposing instead economic protectionism, as a revaluation of the community, of tradition and, in some cases, of a confessional role of religion in public life.

The other is scholar Julian Waller, who notes three forms of postliberalism in academic and political discourse. The most relevant to the present discussion is Waller’s second school of thought, an ideological project that “is built around rejecting midcentury and post-Cold War claims of Catholic compatibilities with market capitalism and the secular, socially liberal, individualized and atomized form of the political regime we call liberal democracy.” This form of postliberalism “asserts the necessary and inevitable connection between religion and politics, largely grounded in the Catholic tradition, and asserts a counter-framework that moves away from a strict secular reading of the idea of church-state separation in favor of greater integration and between the two.” There is also “an emphasis on the use of assertive government activity to pursue ideological goals.”

As one can see, these two definitions overlap quite well, revealing that postliberalism is comprehensible enough a project to secure definitions from the Vatican to the American academy. We can skip over the postliberal effort to conceal what postliberalism means. 

Before moving on, however, I want to explain why postliberals are cagey about their political project. “Postliberalism” as a term is really a rebranding of Catholic integralism. From its first real interest in 2015 until 2020, proponents of Catholic integralism used the term “integralism” as the core identity for their form of right-wing ideological movement, with its “integralism in three sentences” being something many of its proponents could rattle off in conversation or copy and paste in online debates. The rebranding to “postliberalism” became necessary with the publication of Alan Fimister and Thomas Crean’s 2020 volume Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy. Fimister and Crean brought to the surface the subtext of integralist positions. They rather infamously insisted that integralists hold that the unbaptized (meaning especially Jews and Muslims) cannot be citizens, that political authorities can coerce the baptized to obey the Catholic Church, that some forms of slavery are permitted, and that women lack any political independence from their male head of household. No sooner did this book appear on digital shelves than did the most prominent Catholic integralists begin immediately searching for different “brands” for their more discreet ideology. After toying with “political Catholicism” and “Christian realism,” they settled for “postliberalism.” By 2021, Vermeule, Deneen, Pecknold, and Pappin had launched “The Postliberal Order” Substack, thus completing the rebrand.

Darker Historical Associations

With this definition established, let us answer the question of whether there is any substantial connection between postliberalism and either fascism or Nazism. 

Historically speaking, Catholic integralism was a product of nineteenth-century France, attracting traditionalists who worried that the Church was growing too soft on modernity. From the beginning, its ideology was deeply antisemitic. I have covered this elsewhere, so I will give the short version. Catholic integralists stipulated that the French Revolution was the result of a conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews to overturn Catholic monarchies in favor of secular republics. To foment revolution for these republics, the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy promoted “liberalism” as an ideology of freedom from arbitrary constraint. These republics would then target the Catholic Church as their chief enemy. Therefore, for Catholic integralists, the only permissible political course was to restore Catholic monarchies and extirpate the shadowy forces that seek to destroy all that is good and right. 

The First World War saw the end of the hopes for restoration and transformed Catholic integralism into a revolutionary ideology whose adherents regarded a fascist style of politics as a possible pathway to a Catholic authoritarian state. It is no accident that Mussolini was subsidizing their efforts and that Hitler found them to be willing partners in his Final Solution.

As Thomas D. Howes and I will show in greater detail in our forthcoming book, Catholic integralists historically collaborated with fascists and Nazis. Brazilian Catholic integralist Plínio Salgado led an integralist party from 1930 until 1939, with financial support from Benito Mussolini, until the Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas hung Salgado out to dry. After a nearly successful armed coup against Vargas, Salgado fled to Portugal, where in the spring of 1942, he sought support from Nazi agents there to install himself as dictator until the British foreign service publicized his efforts. 

In 1935, Léon Degrelle founded the Catholic integralist Christus Rex Party in Belgium. After making some inroads in the Belgian Parliament in the 1936 elections, he met with Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler and subsequently began receiving a stipend from Mussolini. However, Degrelle never persuaded the Germans that he had either the popular support or the personal talents to be useful to them. After the German conquest of Belgium in 1940, the Nazis handed local control over to the more secular fascist Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond. To prove himself, Degrelle fully endorsed Nazism and joined the SS, served on the eastern front, and returned to Belgium to leverage his service into a political career, just in time to have his plans dashed by D-Day. He ended up in Franco’s Spain and spent the rest of his life fostering the Holocaust Denial genre, while his home became a pilgrimage site for Nazis and neo-Nazis.

Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše of Croatia used Catholic integralism to defend their genocide of Orthodox Serbs, while sending Jews and Roma to Nazi concentration camps. Pavelić had spent much of his time as a potential political ally for Mussolini, living in an Italian villa in Pesaro until Mussolini put him in jail, for a time, after the Ustaše were implicated in the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934. In 1941, Mussolini consulted with Paveliċ and, after the conquest of Yugoslavia, SS General and Holocaust perpetrator Edmund Veesenmayer commanded Pavelić to be made dictator of an independent Croatia as a direct collaborator with the Axis powers, which he remained until his ouster by Tito’s Partisans in 1945. Paveliċ fled to the Vatican and then to Argentina, and finally, after a nearly successful assassination, to Franco’s Spain. Further examples will be recounted in the book.

Darker Contemporary Associations

In contemporary discourse, Catholic integralism has a different valence, one that Patrick Deneen charts in Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen presents liberalism as a blind historical force, similar to what Karl Marx saw in forces like feudalism and capitalism. Also like Marx, Deneen saw liberalism’s failure as structural, with its contradictions laid bare in the politics of the early twenty-first century. The benefit of this critique is that it lacks any of the paranoid, unsubstantiated attributions of agency to disparate groups. Instead, the agency belongs to the ideology, and even liberals are directed by it until liberalism itself collapses. 

However, the conspiratorial tendency still haunts the “structural” approach that Deneen pioneered. It still relies on a story that our social and political life has been secretly molded by a small group of nefarious elites, even if they wear the innocuous moniker “liberals,” where previous generations of integralists would have blamed Jews or Masons. Moreover, when today’s integralists explore the intellectual origins of their movement, it is hard to avoid the more directly antisemitic conspiracies. For instance, Deneen, probably without realizing it, recommended antisemitic and authoritarian critics of liberalism in his discussion with Bishop Robert Barron. In an episode of my podcast, Victoria Holmes mentioned that many of the young professional Catholics she talks to are integralists, and they will refer to century-old English-language Catholic integralist sources that identify Jews and Freemasons as the authors of liberalism. Hence, even if contemporary postliberals do not promote the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, their students are put on the course to rediscover it, and not all of them are averse to embracing it directly. As Jason Hart has repeatedly pointed out, the original lineup of the student-run American Postliberal featured antisemitic ideas, even as Deneen was promoting the group.

Whistling Past the Mass Graveyard

In his recent conversation with Goldberg, George Weigel insisted that this movement is small and unrepresentative of the Catholic Church in America, saying that no one at his parish ever talks about it. One is immediately reminded of the apocryphal story of Pauline Kael stating that “no one I know voted for Nixon,” but regardless, Weigel is right and wrong. He may be right that most Catholics do not talk about integralism, but he is wrong to imply that they do not know what it is or that it does not matter. I recall spending time shooting the breeze with a parishioner I had known for some time when he idly brought up the virtues of Fr. Charles Coughlin. Postliberalism may have a deeper impact on American Catholics than Weigel realizes.

Whether or not that’s true, it’s important to recognize that the central strategy for Catholic integralists has never in any case been to win over Catholic clergy and laity, building the new coalition out of the churches. The strategy has been one of co-opting elites to impose integralist ideas onto a relatively indifferent public. Vermeule explains as much in his writing on the institutional approach with the slogan of “integration from within” and the rationale he borrows from Joseph de Maistre:

The people count for nothing in revolutions, or at most count only as a passive instrument. Four or five persons, perhaps will give France a king. Letters from Paris will announce to the provinces that France has a king, and the provinces will cry, “Long live the king.”

Rather than install a monarch, however, Catholic integralists want to install a Catholic bureaucracy, meaning that theirs is a longer-term project. Perhaps Weigel is right that fewer than a thousand Catholics are aware of Fr. Edmund Waldstein, but if those thousand Catholics were staffing a future presidential administration, Waldstein would then have considerable influence. This might sound like alarmism, but Vermeule is simply deploying the same strategy that more radical figures on the Left have used to introduce their own ideological priorities, such as DEI initiatives in state governments and in the Biden White House. 

Therefore, the hour is later than many like Weigel want to believe. It could be a bad mistake to believe Weigel instead of our lying eyes.

It’s not quite true that 10/7 was Israel’s 9/11. There are stark similarities, to be sure: on both days, jihadists murdered thousands of civilians; both were days of sharp trauma followed by a forgotten national unity in the victim country; both days were “events” in the sense that they seemed to temporarily pause the rhythm and course of civilization before changing it rapidly. But there was one very crucial difference. After 9/11, the Western world was united in its support for the United States in a way it simply was not for Israel following 10/7. 

After al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and DC, memorials were erected across the world. Leaders and populations from London to Moscow were united by a common sense that murdering thousands of civilians in the name of God was evil, whatever the sins of their country. The world reacted differently when 1,200 Israelis were murdered two years ago. Within hours of the news breaking, there were demonstrations in London and Berlin expressing solidarity with Hamas. Ivy League professors were “excited” and found the invasion “awesome.” Before there was a national march in support of Israel in Washington, DC (which remains the only such march in which this author has participated), hundreds of thousands gathered in support of Palestine.

Things got worse from there. On college campuses across the country, students engaged in massive and often vitriolic protests. Some protesters were narrowly critical of how Israel conducted the war in Gaza, but many took issue with the state of Israel as such, glorifying Hamas as a valiant resistance movement and revealing an astounding level of antisemitism. “From the river to the sea” was suddenly ubiquitous on college campuses.

Why is it that so much of the West immediately expressed support for Hamas after 10/7? Why, instead of offering unqualified sympathy with Israel, did so many of our citizens—and particularly our students—rush to condemn the Jewish state when the bodies were still being counted? This is the question animating Douglas Murray’s book, On Democracies and Death Cults. It is a deeply personal and (in true Murray fashion) highly combative testimony to the virtues of the Israeli people. More importantly, it is a plea for the West to regain civilizational confidence and the courage to speak again in terms of “good” and “evil.” It is a plea to which I am sympathetic, but Murray’s polemical approach will persuade few who do not already agree with him.

Description

It’s important to note at the outset that Murray’s book is not a historical account of why Westerners have become more sympathetic to Gazan “resistance.” Animated by this question, it never submits a systematic answer. It accepts the premise that Western youth have lost the capacity to identify good and evil in a case that calls for little qualification. Neither is the book an assessment of Israel’s war against Hamas (though Murray is resolutely supportive of the war). Murray cares much more about whether the aims of Israel’s war are just rather than how the war is being executed. 

The book is instead a forceful attempt to persuade readers that Israel is a force for good, that it represents and embodies the life-affirming values of civilization as such, and that it is engaged in war against death-worshipping nihilists. Understanding the justness and appropriateness of war against Hamas is crucial for the West, Murray maintains. “The right of Israel to fight and win such a war is vital not just for the sake of that country, but so Britain, America, and every other Western country will be able to fight such a war if—or when—it comes.”

Murray makes no systematic effort to explain how Israel embodies civilization; he treats it as obvious at every level. At the social and political level, Israel is ethnically diverse, economically developed, and proudly democratic despite generations of war. It is a place where the religiously orthodox live side-by-side with secular hippies, gay ravers, and Arab Muslims. Far from being an apartheid state, Israel’s non-Jewish population has mushroomed, enjoys the same political rights as Jews, and is economically vibrant. Gaza, by contrast, is (or was) ruled by a mixture of corrupt authoritarians and religious fanatics who’ve become grossly wealthy while their citizens live in poverty. In Gaza, billions in foreign aid have been diverted from economic development and used instead to invest in military equipment and a now infamous tunnel infrastructure. Where Israelis treasure life, Hamas’s leaders are doggedly obsessed with destroying Israel. The former pays a steep price to save a single hostage; the latter hides weapons in nurseries and supports families of terrorists who’ve “martyred” themselves.

If these broad strokes aren’t enough to convince readers, Murray provides plenty of narrative accounts of Hamas’s barbarism and Israeli heroism. One noteworthy case is that of Tamir Adar, a nephew of the Israeli doctor who saved Yahya Sinwar’s life while the latter was in captivity. Tamir was a farmer who lived in Nir Oz, one of the kibbutzim Hamas attacked on 10/7. Noticing that the Israeli army was not arriving, Tamir secured his family in their safe room and rushed out to fight off the invaders. His body was found in Gaza in January 2024. It turned out that he died in the kibbutz on 10/7, and the terrorists took his body as a bargaining chip. Incidentally, his eighty-five-year-old grandmother, Yaffa Adar, was also kidnapped from her home. Readers may recognize her from the viral photo of an old woman sitting stoically in a golf cart as it drives into Gaza.

The gallantry of Tamir and the stoicism of Yaffa stand in stark contrast with the behavior of Hamas soldiers. They engaged in all sorts of heinous acts now well-documented: mass rape, torture, executions, burning families alive. Murray notes on a couple of occasions that, where the Nazis had enough residual decency to hide their war crimes, Hamas and its partners gleefully recorded and disseminated their acts.

With this in mind, Murray maintains, it is pure hysteria to chastise Israel as a force of oppression or imperialism, to say nothing of genocide. So glaring are the holes in critics’ arguments, so eager is the condemnation of Israel that he chalks up the outrage to pure, unadorned antisemitism.

In one of the few passages offering an answer to his guiding question, Murray quotes the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman, who saw antisemitism both as a sign of civilizational decline and as a mirror for diagnosing one’s sins: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of—I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” Cosplay revolutionaries who march against Israel, who call it a “genocidal, apartheid state,” reveal more about themselves than any truth about Israel. The garb of their antisemitism shows they feel guilty about their own societies’ experience with imperialism and genocide that they project onto the Jews. Their desperation is no more than an attempt at atonement for their own misguided shame.

Assessment

The book’s strongest contribution is its collection of stories about Israelis during and after 10/7. Some are simple testimonies, efforts of the writer to make sure that the victims’ story is heard. They are often difficult to read. The reader can sense that Murray felt a passionate urge to give a voice to the victims. As he writes in the introduction, “I decided, in short, not just to work out what happened, but to become a witness.” Murray does a great service in capturing the human toll of 10/7 and should be applauded for doing so.

Other vignettes serve simply to show how impressive Israelis are. Anyone who has spent time in the country knows this. There is a quiet, unassuming courage in the average Israeli’s life, an organic toughness that only necessity can yield. As one kibbutz resident casually said to Murray, “Yeah, okay we have missiles … but it’s a very good place to raise kids.” Murray is right to contrast this with Westerners who, having lived without a real threat for two generations, take their security for granted. In an increasingly combustible world, we could benefit from a touch of Spartan grit.

But on the level of argument, Murray overstates his case, often in glaring ways. A revealing example is when he alleges hypocrisy at leftists who scream of Israel’s crimes but say very little in the face of other atrocities. For example, where was the outrage during Bashar al-Assad’s siege of Aleppo, or the plight of women in Iran, or the horrors in Sudan? He’s right, of course, the outrage against men like al-Assad or Ayatollah Khamenei is muted when compared to anti-Israel sentiments. But then, this is hardly surprising; these men are (or were) authoritarians. Israel, by contrast, is a democracy that enjoys substantial American aid. The fact that the country receives greater scrutiny is expected, and a testimony to the high standards citizens in a democracy expect of their friends.

I am not of the opinion that when speaking of a country, we must be sure to reference all of its sins, to check off the list of injustices, to try and please the jackboots. But when speaking of Israel and Palestine, it is irresponsible to ignore that there are those west of the Jordan who deliberately make peace difficult and would settle all the way to the Euphrates if given the chance. When the justification for this behavior is no more than a willful assertion of divine right, we are far away from civilized behavior.

Murray says nothing about West Bank settlers whose continued (and accelerated) expansion causes the most consternation among young Westerners. This is an amazing omission precisely because Murray will persuade no one who does not already submit to his broad characterization if he doesn’t acknowledge and address the serious problems in Israeli government and society fueling this expansion. He will certainly not persuade any confused, historically ignorant students who think Israel is guilty of imperialism. At a time when we should be engaging in serious, even heartfelt conversations with youth who are confused about a region rife with complexity and historical grievance, Murray opts for red meat.

I share much of Murray’s frustration and think his intention is laudable. Moreover, I admire his unflinching stance against antisemites of all kinds and especially his voiceful opposition to those emerging fringes on the right. Israel is rightfully an ally, one wrongly dragged through the muck at every turn by academics and activists who know little of its history and who have the strategic depth and empathy of a fish. 

But if friends of Israel want to counter the youth’s growing aversion to the Jewish state, they must be willing to discuss Israel’s sins head-on. Murray doesn’t do that. He contents himself with showing how the other side is a death cult and rests his case. In the end, his book will make those who uncritically love Israel cheer, and those most in need of a change of heart roll their eyes.