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.
Even if contemporary postliberals do not promote the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, their students are put on the course to rediscovering it, and not all of them are averse to embracing it directly.
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.