Adrian Pabst in The Ideas Letter:
A body of ideas with roots in academic theology and philosophy, postliberalism has emerged as an influential intellectual movement in the US and Europe. It gained a new kind of prominence with Donald Trump’s 2024 victory. Vice President JD Vance describes himself as part of the Catholic “postliberal right” and he is friends with two of its leading thinkers.1 One is Adrian Vermeule, whose work on common good constitutionalism invokes the controversial jurist Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933. The other is Patrick Deneen, author of the bestselling book Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and the successor tome Regime Change (2023)
In their recent book Why Postliberalism Failed (2026), James Patterson and Thomas Howes cast the Deneen-Vermeule version of postliberalism as an authoritarian threat to church-state separation and a quasi-fascist attack on the ideal of ordered liberty at the heart of America’s constitutional and civic republican tradition. Does Catholic postliberalism inevitably slide into fascism? Is this ideology now only one heartbeat away from the US presidency? Have European postliberals embraced the American version or forged their own vision?
Since the 2008–2009 financial crisis and the 2016 votes for Brexit and Trump, there has been a widespread sense that the dominance of liberalism has ended but that no new model has taken its place. This diagnosis recalls a famous passage from the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
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