Caesar wept

What is Trumpism?​ After all these years, we’re still asking the question. For some, Trump’s second term has revealed the fascism that was there all along; others diagnose a peculiar combination of 1970s New York swamp politics and Southern white supremacy. One thing is beyond dispute: recent months have seen an extraordinary concentration of executive power and an unprecedented weakening, perhaps the outright destruction, of what US civics textbooks once touted as a robust separation of powers. A simple explanation would be that the GOP and Trump’s lackeys on the Supreme Court are letting him do it. A more interesting account – in fact a justification – is provided by thinkers often grouped together as ‘post-liberals’.

Like other terms featuring what has sometimes been called a ‘magical prefix’, ‘post-liberal’ has both a complicated history and many conflicting meanings. It was first used in the 1970s by American theologians who sought a post-liberal alternative to forms of Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal thought as well as the social sciences, and influencing what came to be known as Blue Labour and Red Toryism. Representatives of both tendencies turned against laissez-faire capitalism; both claimed that excessive individualism and an increasingly overbearing state were not in opposition, but constantly reinforcing each other. One proposed remedy, the Big Society, amounted at most to Thatcherism with a human face: the Cameron government talked of empowering communities and local associations, but the reality was austerity and deregulation.

In the US, three strands of post-liberal thought have emerged over the last decade. Most prominent are the self-declared ‘populists’, such as Sohrab Ahmari and the GOP senator Josh Hawley, who seek to replace the Reaganite fusion of pro-market ideology and traditional morals with a ‘working-class conservatism’. Then there are the ‘National Conservatives’, who are opposed to globalisation in general and the institutions of ‘global governance’ in particular, but are much more likely than populists to praise ‘free enterprise’. Finally, there’s a smattering of religiously inspired theorists – mostly hard-right Catholics – who are less interested in big societies than in big states promoting, or even enforcing, traditional morality.

For these American post-liberals, liberalism is guilty of more than the destruction of Gemeinschaft. It is, they say, profoundly hypocritical: liberals talk about tolerance and individuality, but are dangerously intolerant and eager to enforce conformity. They deploy state power to eradicate ways of life devoted to anything other than the pursuit of individual autonomy: a much cited example is the requirement, introduced by the Obama administration, that employers provide workers with access to contraceptives through their insurance plans (this was restricted after a legal challenge by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic group). According to post-liberals in the US, liberalism only pretends to be neutral in conflicts between what John Rawls called ‘conceptions of the good’; in reality, its insistence on a single human good amounts to totalitarianism.

What might a post-liberal politics look like? Those lacking a general political theory tend to gesture towards a specific place: Hungary. Viktor Orbán’s self-declared ‘illiberal democracy’ has become a Disneyland for the international far right. Its attractions include natalist policies, an unashamed ‘Hungary First’ attitude, the promotion of Christianity in public culture and an assault on academia intended to end a supposed left-liberal hegemony. In 2024, J.D. Vance declared that ‘the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us.’ (It has indeed proved to be the model for the second Trump administration, except that Orbán is too intelligent to gut scientific research.)

But Hungary is a small, highly centralised Central European country with relatively little ethnic diversity and an industrial base reliant on German car manufacturers. Does it really provide a plausible template? Symptomatic of post-liberals’ uncertainty about which direction to take was a book called Regime Change by Patrick Deneen, one of Orbán’s great fans and fellow-travellers, which was published in 2023. Deneen, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, had risen to prominence five years earlier after the appearance of his short book, Why Liberalism Failed. After the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump, liberals were not only embarking on Trump safaris in Appalachia and repenting of their supposed failure to pay attention to the ‘left behind’, but were seeking too to signal an openness to non-liberal ideas, with even Obama praising Deneen’s ‘cogent insights’. At that point, however, Deneen’s prescription was curiously defeatist: a retreat into illiberal communities in small-town America, in the hope that the increasingly totalitarian liberal state might somehow leave you alone.

By the time Regime Change was published, Deneen’s recommendations had changed. Rather than telling conservatives to flee to the countryside, he called for a great replacement – of one elite by another. Anti-liberals should tear off the ‘Botox-smoothed meritocratic mask’ worn by liberals and form their own ‘better aristocracy’. Once this elite had come to power through the application of ‘muscular populism’, it would take good care of what Deneen called the ‘commoners’. The masses, he said, wanted ‘continuity’ and ‘stability’; therefore the new regime should pursue ‘common good conservatism’. The phrase ‘common good’ appeared 68 times in Regime Change. This pointed to the growing influence of Adrian Vermeule, a thinker who seemed able to offer a proper political as well as legal theory of post-liberalism. Born into the New England intellectual aristocracy (Emily Dickinson is a distant relative), Vermeule went to Harvard Law School and then clerked for the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. As an academic at Chicago and then Harvard, he became a wunderkind in the field of administrative law, writing a number of important and exceedingly dry justifications for a powerful state bureaucracy.

Vermeule’s justification of robust state action came in handy during the ‘global war on terror’. With another legal scholar, Eric Posner, he advocated an unconstrained executive in the face of threats to national security. In The Executive Unbound (2010), they rejected James Madison’s scheme of separating powers, siding instead with Alexander Hamilton, who thought that ‘energy’ in the executive was indispensable for ‘good government’. ‘Unbound’ wasn’t supposed to mean ‘unlimited’: Posner and Vermeule argued that ‘public opinion’ would act as the ultimate constraint on a wayward president. That seemed a tad naive, given the obvious pathologies of the US media system and the rise of polarisation entrepreneurs. Less naive, unfortunately, was their statement that ‘if the president can credibly claim to the public that [a] violation was necessary, then the public will be unlikely to care too much about the legal niceties’ – as succinct a description as any of Americans’ responses to torture under George W. Bush.

After converting from Episcopalianism to Catholicism in 2016 – he claimed that there was no stable point between atheism and Catholicism – Vermeule developed an online presence dedicated to trolling and triggering the libs. He was fond of quoting the most incendiary pronouncements of 19th-century French reactionaries such as Louis Veuillot and Joseph de Maistre (for example, sovereignty ‘is always one, inviolable and absolute’). Above all, he started to discuss his ultimate preference for Catholic integralism: a subordination of the state to the Church. He proposed various authoritarian schemes, always with some degree of plausible deniability. His suggested solution to political dysfunction in Washington was that the US should follow the example of medieval Italian city-states and appoint a podestà, a foreigner who would be given executive and judicial powers to set the house in order. His preferred candidate for the role was Eduard Karl Joseph Michael Marcus Antonius Koloman Volkhold Maria Habsburg-Lothringen, Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See. The back-up, in case Habsburg proved unavailable, was the commander of the Pontifical Swiss Guard.

As an analyst of the modern administrative state, Vermeule had long defended the notion that judges and legislatures should defer to regulators, on the grounds that only regulators have the expertise to address complex policy challenges. This placed him on one side of a debate about the role of bureaucrats in democratic states that had been raging since at least the early 20th century. For decades, Republicans had complained that presidents were unable to exercise proper control over the state bureaucracy because the leaders of government agencies could only be fired ‘for cause’ (and not because they were at odds with the president’s political programme).

In​ 2022, in the face of an apparently deepening crisis of US political institutions, Vermeule published Common Good Constitutionalism, a book he described, with Oxbridge levels of fake self-deprecation, as ‘deliberately unoriginal’. He claimed simply to be proposing a return to the ‘classical tradition’ of the West, supposedly a ‘synthesis of Roman law, canon law and local civil law’. In Vermeule’s telling, well-ordered polities had always pursued the ‘common good’, namely ‘peace, justice and abundance’. The Founding Fathers had apparently been following this classical tradition (although they never quite said so), yet contemporary American jurisprudence in both its left-wing and right-wing forms was oblivious to it. Conservatives kept pushing their obtuse ‘originalism’, which Vermeule dismissed as intellectually bankrupt. He pointed out that it licensed judges to pick random evidence from the 18th century (or, often, to make things up); the purpose of the exercise was usually to vindicate some libertarian position in the present. Liberal jurists, who favoured the idea of a ‘living constitutionalism’, got off more lightly. One of them, Ronald Dworkin (who had conveniently died in 2013), was even enlisted in Vermeule’s common-good project. Dworkin had understood the importance of identifying the morality underlying a constitution; the problem was that his view of morality was liberal. Contrary to what Dworkin had taught, individual rights were not ‘trumps’ against the state; rather, they had to be understood in the light of a pre-existing account of the common good, and ordered towards it.

As the German jurist Jannis Lennartz has written, Vermeule resembled an American tourist rummaging through a European intellectual antiquities store, picking out a little natural law theory from Aquinas, some Roman materials from a dark corner at the back; he then resold the resulting bricolage under the label ‘classical’ (as Vermeule himself has conceded, ‘law being messy, it is always possible to find some material or other to support a thesis’). He insisted that his thesis about common good constitutionalism was merely a ‘structure of justification’, not his own substantial account of the common good. But he did give a sense of the sort of policies that would follow from such an account: pornography should be outlawed as part of an ‘environmentalism for morals’; unborn children should be attributed an ‘affirmative right to life that states must respect in their criminal and civil law’; marriage could only be conceived as a ‘natural and moral and legal reality simultaneously, a form itself constituted by the natural law … as the permanent union of man and woman under the general telos or indwelling aims of unity and procreation’. More ominous still, he wrote that ‘the claim, from the notorious joint opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that each individual may “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” should be … stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable for ever after.’

Vermeule insisted that a range of political regimes were compatible with common good constitutionalism; any that pursued the common good was legitimate. This meant that there was nothing special about democracy, ‘in the modern sense of mass electoral democracy’. It was enough to have some mechanisms for participation, so that regimes could acquire information about their own societies: Vermeule listed ‘petitioning, consultation and local and provincial democracy’ – which sounds suspiciously like the institutions people cite as justification for China’s one-party state. Vermeule also discussed scenarios in which a robust post-liberal use of state power was appropriate: to enforce vaccine mandates, for instance, or to protect the environment, or to order property rights towards the common good. Vermeule’s account was as politically implausible as Deneen’s ‘Aristopopulism’, and about as historically accurate as Asterix. He cited the example of the good Roman emperor, to whom the people – disgusted with rule by optimates (read: corrupt liberal elites) – had handed all power and authority. Together with capable advisers and administrators, a benign Caesar would rule in the interest of the plebs, or, as Vermeule put it, ‘when the poor cry, then as a matter of constitutional principle and justice, Caesar ought to weep.’

And if he doesn’t? Despite his earlier work on designing legal institutions, Vermeule’s defence of common good constitutionalism lacked what most scholars would associate with the term ‘constitutionalism’: constraints on the powerful. He had long reproached liberals for being squeamish about power and obsessed with minimising risk. In ‘Optimal Abuse of Power’, published in the Northwestern University Law Review in 2015, Vermeule had insisted that ‘a government that always forms undistorted judgments, and that never abuses its power, will do too little, do it too amateurishly, and do it too slowly.’ He endorsed the formulation coined by his Spanish disciple Ricardo Calleja: imperare aude – dare to rule.

Has this vision of an unconstrained but benign ruler now materialised? No one can doubt that we are living in an age ‘after the Madisonian republic’, as the subtitle of Posner and Vermeule’s book put it: the president, not Congress, now decides how money is spent and which tariffs can be imposed on Switzerland simply because its president wasn’t nice enough to Trump on the phone. All this is plainly illegal, but the Supreme Court, with its increasingly shameless MAGA majority, doesn’t mind. And despite the hope that Posner and Vermeule invested in public opinion, Trump seems unmoved by his declining popularity.

In other respects, Trump’s second term has undermined much of Vermeule’s work. The federal bureaucracy, Vermeule’s ‘engine of unsurpassed power for promoting the common good’, is being dismantled: by the end of the year, as many as 300,000 federal workers will have lost their jobs. Science and expertise are being derided by quacks and conspiracy theorists. Manifestly unqualified TV personalities lead entire departments and spend more energy on producing clips for social media than on governing. In May the Supreme Court decided that the executive could fire nominally independent civil servants, helping to realise the right’s dream of a so-called unitary executive under the president’s total control. Pro-market conservatives have always claimed that only under such conditions could a presidency be democratically accountable; the reality, however, is the appointment of partisan hacks. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has exempted one institution: the Federal Reserve (even the MAGA justices accepted that a completely politicised central bank might have disastrous financial consequences). That didn’t stop Trump from trying to fire one of its governors, Lisa Cook – not coincidentally, the first Black woman ever appointed to the Fed’s board.

Vermeule’s integralism has also run into trouble. In January, the very online Vance engaged in a spat on X with Rory Stewart about the correct understanding of Augustine’s idea of ordo amoris, the proper ordering of love. According to Vance, another recent convert to Catholicism (Catholic converts have long played an outsize role on the American right), Augustine wanted to give priority to the near and dear – and to the nation, of course. When Stewart rejected this enlisting of theology for ‘tribalism’, he was dismissed by Vance as a member of the liberal elite, despite his being one of the last of a dying breed of patrician Tories. Then a message arrived from a figure whose word presumably still counts for something in Catholic circles. Pope Francis, in his ‘Letter to the Bishops of the United States’, not only rejected Vance’s Magafication of Augustine, but outlined his own understanding of the common good. The ‘true common good’, Francis wrote, ‘is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all … welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable’. Vermeule took all of this in his stride. ‘You know you’re in a post-liberal order when high elected leaders explain their views in terms of political theology,’ he tweeted, ‘and the main debate isn’t over whether they are “intolerant” but whether the political theology is right or wrong.’

He has also sided with the Trumpists against the lower courts, describing attempts to strike down government policies – on deportations, among other things – as judicial ‘mutiny’; his arguments were duly retweeted by Vance. Just as Obama and Biden deployed the power of the administrative state in the service of diversity and equity, Vermeule wrote, conservatives should use the bureaucracy to pursue conservative aims. As he reminded liberals, it was Obama who said: ‘I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.’ With Trump back in power, it was time for government agencies to protect ‘the intrinsic value of human life from the womb to natural death’, ‘to channel and morph the direction or tone of a polity’s creative, artistic and cultural endeavours’ and, by extension, to go after illegitimate private power, from ‘woke universities’ to supposedly liberal law firms. Unlike much traditional Catholic thought, Vermeule’s work gives pluralism and decentralisation no moral weight. If liberals took a page from Deneen’s book and tried to retreat into their own communities, Vermeule’s state would presumably still come after them. One of his catchphrases is a saying attributed to Veuillot: ‘When the liberals are in power, we demand liberty from them, because that is their principle; and, when we are in power, we’ll refuse it to them because that is our principle.’

Vermeule’s ‘deliberately unoriginal’ framework has influenced senior American judges such as James Ho and Paul Matey, and helped spawn a network of organisations and think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic, where earnest young men in blazers and khakis give lectures on ‘the classical tradition’. Vermeule was the first ‘guest scholar’ at the Oxford law faculty’s Common Good Project, which was founded in 2021. On his trip to the UK in August, Vance met the Cambridge theologian James Orr, chair of the advisory board of the Reform-aligned Centre for a Better Britain and a fierce critic of ‘late-stage liberalism’s cosmopolitan egalitarian’ reading of ordo amoris. Another think tank, the Common Good Foundation, was established in 2016; its director, Maurice Glasman, earlier the founder of Blue Labour, was the only Labour figure to attend Trump’s second inauguration.

There are important differences between these figures – and it’s hardly forbidden to talk about the common good. In a sense, all parties in a democracy compete on the basis of different conceptions of the common good. Such conceptions can neither be proven nor falsified; but, crucially, they should not be imposed by a higher authority, in the way integralists imagine. Yet Vermeule sees the US travelling in precisely such a direction. He recently wrote, sounding not only integralist but imperialist, that ‘as America becomes ever more Catholic (not necessarily as a statistical matter, but in terms of its governing principles and public culture), all that is true and good in American Protestant culture will be preserved, refined and perfected, while the dross that Leo XIII called “Americanism” will be discarded.’ What this has translated to in practice is Vermeule’s justification of Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into Washington DC, while conceding that crime there (‘in the strict legal sense’) has actually been declining. The real problem to be confronted by the guardsmen, he said, was an ‘ambient social disorder’ that is ‘deeply corrosive’ of the common good. Twentieth-century Catholic authoritarians would have recognised this distinctly post-liberal, in fact anti-liberal vision: a good society is one in which everything and everyone is in their pre-assigned place.

Was such an authoritarian outcome inherent in post-liberalism from the start? British post-liberals would of course say otherwise. Milbank and his allies have been good at exposing the hollowness of some of the American versions of post-liberalism. Clearly, these are not serious attempts to promote ‘working-class conservatism’; despite Vance’s sentimental account of his upbringing, he has supported Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy and the destruction of what little is left of trade union power in the US. The ‘Nat Cons’ are also a con: Milbank characterises their vision as ‘individualism writ collectively large on the global stage’. Their appeals to ancient religious wisdom (‘No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God,’ as the National Conservative ‘statement of principles’ puts it) overlook the fact that the nation-state is a distinctly modern – in many ways liberal – invention. One of Milbank’s intellectual allies, Adrian Pabst, a political philosopher at the University of Kent, has said that National Conservatism has a ‘fundamental identity crisis. One day it wants to be anti-liberal, the next day it is ultra-liberal.’ Catholics in particular can hardly deny the moral equality of all humans; as Phillip Blond, the author of Red Tory, wrote in 2023, handing over universality to liberals ‘seems to be at best ill thought through, and at worst acquiescent to evil’.

All post-liberals have at one point or another declared themselves anti-libertarian. Why is it, then, that once in power supposedly post-liberal politicians re-enact Thatcherism and Reaganism, often going much further than those leaders did? (Reagan also vilified supposedly lefty universities, but wouldn’t have dismantled scientific research.) Could it be that Republican and Tory donors aren’t all that interested in working-class conservatism? It’s clear that the state bureaucracy isn’t being reduced in order to focus more effectively on the common good of Deneen’s ‘commoners’, but to harm any group disliked by the Christian nationalists so prominent in the Trump administration.

Plenty of post-liberal intellectuals appear to believe their own tales about a totalitarian woke left imposing ideology from the top. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that cultural and intellectual life might proceed organically, and that patient persuasion is key, rather than what Milbank has criticised as the ‘mechanical forcing’ championed by right-wing integralists. To be sure, the non-authoritarian, somewhat more left-wing version of post-liberalism – inspired by Ruskin rather than Marx – also struggles with the means of transition to a different kind of society. Milbank and his disciples gesture at the need for institutions that will help build a ‘community of communities’ not subjugated by central state power (with the Church assigned a special role). But how to get there? Community land trusts, worker representation in companies, wage boards – all these sound more plausible than Vance’s faux-populism and Vermeule’s ruefully vague ‘common good’. But the question is not just how these things are supposed to emerge without ‘mechanical forcing’ by concentrated state power; there are also the broader preconditions required to achieve the aims of post-liberalism. One of the forgotten episodes of early Thatcherism is the attempt to emulate the German model of vocational training; soon enough, the Thatcherites realised that such a plan would fail without the right sort of institutions – including well-functioning trade unions.

How does Trumpism fit into this complicated ideological landscape? It may not contain the essence of post-liberalism, but some self-declared post-liberals – partly by default and partly on account of the anti-liberal elements in their thinking – have found plenty to justify in Trump’s second term. By contrast, a post-liberalism that favours charity over ostentatious cruelty, that puts the universal above the national and prioritises the social – something like solidarity – over unconstrained state power seems to be at a loss when it comes to more directly political strategies. What passes for post-liberalism today is either pernicious or impotent.