Liberalism, Post-Liberalism, and Being Weird

The Boundaries of American Liberalism

Something that’s been interesting to me ever since JD Vance was announced as the VP pick is how quickly he became the most unfavorably received Vice Presidential candidate in American history. It’s not that there haven’t been other bad choices before—I remember Sarah Palin—but Vance was met with almost immediate dislike from the second he stood next to Trump.

He is by all accounts deeply intelligent. He’s an Iraq veteran. He came from a difficult home and achieved significant personal success. His story—at least on its face—ought to have resonated with voters at some level. However, everyone hates him.

I don’t think him being awkward is quite the explanation—every political figure has awkward moments. My theory for the overwhelming dislike of Vance is that he’s our first actual national-level political figure who isn’t liberal.

The United States as a political entity has always been explicitly defined from our outset as being an ideologically liberal nation. Despite whatever nonsense people attempt to trot out about alternative stories for America, the men who wrote our founding documents weren’t exactly subtle about their actual motivations.

I won’t retreat the entirety of the Federalist Papers here—I’d hope you’ve already read them if you believe in American ideals. I, however, will say that our national identity was consciously shaped by Enlightenment liberalism mixed with the traditions of Republicanism dating back to Athens (even if they cared much more about Rome).

The challenge of America throughout our history has been about living up to and fulfilling these ideals—and those who’ve wanted to see otherwise. The only real attempt to create some form of America absent liberalism was the Confederacy, and that ideological creation was decisively defeated in 1865. After Lincoln, there has never really been an understanding of America that wasn’t a liberal democracy.

In the contemporary political landscape of America, the vast majority of us are liberals of some variety. I don’t think you can understand the symbology and appeals to various ideals without grasping that the dominant political strain in our political life stretches from progressive liberalism to a form of conservative liberalism.

Much of the competition in our politics is consumed with fighting over the meaning of various liberal political symbols like “freedom,” and what that entails.

As such, we all tend to engage in a long-running fight over who owns the American Revolution, or what the American flag represents. We all inherently see these symbols as our own, and as such we seek to imbue them with the meaning of our preferred wing of liberalism.

What I’m getting at here is that for the most part, we all implicitly accept that the boundaries of acceptable political discourse in the United States are within the ideological structure of liberalism. Our fights are more about what liberalism is than it is fighting over a wholly separate set of ideals.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say you can’t believe in America as a nation with ideals without being some variation of liberal. Rejecting liberalism would require the rejection of our founding principles and these symbols.

Liberalism—with certain necessary restrictions—tends to enforce this ideological structure through social stigma as opposed to violence of the State. The great competitors to liberal democracy—fascism and communism—both imposed their visions through a combination of the two.

I’d never deny that social stigma played a role in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union—but both States also obviously relied upon highly elaborate systems of violent State security to enforce their ideological visions.

Liberalism doesn’t need that. Our norms are for the most part enforced through an implicit acceptance of social boundaries on what we can expect of each other. As long as those norms are upheld, we’ll probably still dislike each other, but we’d accept we both exist inside the normal bounds of American discourse.

What is “weird” is almost entirely a socially defined term. It functionally just means that a person falls outside the norms that we’ve established. In a political sense, it tends to be shorthand for persons who advocate for a political structure outside of our own.

The system of social ostracization of those who fall outside the bounds of what we feel is acceptable has proven to be quite effective throughout the history of the United States. Eisenhower was a liberal, LBJ was a liberal, Obama was a liberal, and Reagan was a liberal. Certainly all different types of liberals. But all of them were liberals.

Which is what gets me back to JD Vance. While Vance has all the surface-level attributes of a politician who should be successful—his political upbringing was with the post-liberal movement. To anyone unfamiliar with the post-liberals it is a largely Catholic movement that embraces a deeply socially conservative version of social democracy.

While the movement is incredibly fractious, and I doubt I could really give a good summary of their beliefs, I think it would be fair if I said they embraced a political philosophy that calls for the overturning of what would traditionally be called “individual rights” in favor of what they like to call the “common good.”

In short, the individual is no longer the important part of a political community (hence post-liberal) and American liberalism must be replaced with a new political order that uses the State to structure the lives of all citizens towards the ends of the “common good.”

Now, this system of beliefs has mostly just been popular with idiosyncratic professors, and people that are addicted to Twitter. It has effectively no real-world political support base. To anyone who has a background in political philosophy—a niche ideological belief being popular in insular academic and internet communities is nothing new.

There’s also nothing wrong with talking about the ideas inside the academy. I’ve also sat around in a seminar and discussed seriously the political beliefs of everyone from Plato to Ernst Jünger.

The problem is thinking that what makes sense around a seminar table translates to the political trail. You’re no longer just sitting around with your friends and chatting about philosophers—you’re advocating for policies to be implemented in the lives of others. If I talk about Plato’s Republic of the Mind, it doesn’t mean I want to see the American public put into warrior castes when they’re born.

If I did that, you know what I’d be? I’d be pretty fucking weird.

Which is what I think happened to Vance.

I don’t think this ever affected Trump since at the end of the day Trump still operates within the symbols and terms of American liberalism. While I don’t like him, he fundamentally still argues about what the meaning of words like freedom or democracy ought to be. It’s more akin to a reflexive (and authoritarian) conservative liberalism than it is to something truly outside the bounds of the American tradition.

Vance has explicitly and consciously positioned himself outside of that tradition. Vance believes that the actual American order itself is wrong from inception and must be replaced with an entirely new system of political philosophy. In the same way that your average person would look at a guy rambling about embracing Maoism would engender weird looks, so does Vance.

When he’s talking about childless cat ladies, or how grandmothers biologically exist to take care of children—I don’t think people are recoiling just from those explicit sentences. They’re recoiling because Vance is functionally proposing a distinct separate set of political values that we ought to order our political community around.

In my opinion, it’s not strictly limited to the idea that women who don’t have kids lack value, the implicit claim is that individuals who are not subsuming their individual will to the supposed collective good of the whole lack value when compared against his post-liberal ideal.

It’s weird because Americans are almost all liberals—we all generally agree that the good of the individual is balanced against the good of the whole and that individual choices ought to be accommodated by the political community. We respect when individuals choose to serve their country, and we acknowledge that times of crisis necessitate sacrifice on behalf of the whole—but liberalism rejects the totalizing notion that a person’s existence only ought to serve the broader community.

If Vance was running for office in an integralist commune at Notre Dame he might be the most popular man in town, but as it stands, he’s running to be Vice President of America. And anyone who wants to be Vice President and doesn’t believe in liberalism is going to be weird.