Our Schmittian Moment

On what 'post-liberal' means

President Trump recently posted:

@realDonaldTrump

He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.

Now, I hate Twitter, or X, or whatever it is. Not ideologically. I hate the format. Its character limit prohibits actual thought and dialogue.

But this statement does not require any more characters and is the most politically significant 13 syllables uttered in my lifetime. This is going to be one of those rare posts where I take up current news headlines because I think something truly significant has happened.

Post-Liberalism

‘Post-liberal’ and ‘post-liberalism’ have become popular phrases in political discourse over the past decade. The concept first emerged, I believe, from circles on both the British left and the British right: Blue Labour and Red Tories. Both were moving away from ‘liberalism’ (Thatcherism in that context) with its emphasis on individual rights, pro-capitalism, proceduralism, constitutionalism, limited government, and end-neutrality (refusal to sanction human ends rooted in a definite human nature); ie, neo-liberalism in short.

They were moving towards a sort of communitarianism which emphasized the common good, solidarity, virtue, and post-secular society. Maurice Glasman, Adrian Pabst, and Phillip Blond would be names to look up from that direction and earlier there was the Canadian George Grant. In the States this has been especially associated with Catholic thinkers such as John Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame and Adrian Vermeule at Harvard (I bother to name names in case anyone wants to look into the roots of this further). Before them was Alasdair MacIntyre (also Notre Dame). For what it is worth, J.D. Vance is steeped in this stuff.

Liberalism, broadly conceived, was largely hegemonic in the Western world since the 19th century and completely so since the defeats of Fascism and Communism. Many spoke prosaically of the ‘end of history’ as we would just be liberals forever and ever.

The real world has moved past liberalism long ago. In the United States, starting especially with the administration of Barak Obama and the ideology of ‘woke’ from the left.

The on-the-ground post-liberal right in the US has effectively been Trump and MAGA and the populist resistance to globalism.

Trump has made the end of liberalism exceptionally explicit, and probably irrevocable, with this statement. To be clear, this is not ‘conservatism.’ Trump (2.0 anyway) is a revolutionary, not a conservative.

Enter Carl Schmitt

The big question for folks who were following these trends, especially the more self-conscious, right-ish ones, was ‘concretely, what marks the transition?’ I’m not sure there is a self-conscious left that is actually getting any of this, though it was the left, via the academic journal Telos, that largely intellectually rehabilitated Schmitt in the 1980s and 90s.

That question has now been answered by Carl Schmitt as channeled by Donald Trump (see my cautionary description of Schmitt in the very first thing I published online The Mortal God Drops Its Mask and produced as a video by Dr. Sam Bailey).

Very briefly, Schmitt had argued that liberalism was internally incoherent because its liberal principles (limited government, constitutionalism, parliamentarianism) rested on anti-liberal political reality. Political reality is centered on power, not rights, he argued. Rights are enshrined by laws, but the establishment of law was a matter of power. He with power writes the laws.

This was tested, he said, in the moment of ‘the exception’: the moment when law was suspended in the name of preserving the nation and thereby the law. He who declares the exception is Sovereign. Trump just said he is Sovereign.

I read some leftish mainstream newspaper saying this meant Trump was a dictator. I think that is not wrong exactly, but I think that commentator had no idea what they were talking about as they were still operating, somehow, within a basically liberal frame of reference.

This is our Schmittian moment. Liberalism is dead. We will miss at least aspects of it.

I wrote in a note about two weeks ago that we were witnessing a ‘post-liberal, right-populist revolution.’ I feel vindicated, for what that is worth.

This is the revolution we have. Like it or not. And it is being televised.

And what about little WD?

I consider these to be some of the theoretical waters I swim in. When I have to express my ‘research interests’ academically, I say something about ‘theorizing the post-liberal’. In my ‘Holler’ description, that would be handled by the ‘anti-modern’ part of the descriptor. The normative part is the ‘egalitarian’. That is what I worry about. Will our post-liberal world be egalitarian, recognize the value of each person, and all that entails about liberty, dignity, etc…, or not?

Our post-liberal world is up for grabs: theoretically and politically. I’m not going to set around bemoaning that. Trump is not a theoretician. He’s not even really a politician. He’s a force of nature. Liberalism was stillborn as far as I’m concerned. Now we struggle to define the post-liberal.

My sleeves are rolled up, my thinking cap is on, and I’m checking that my principles are wired tight.

Let’s Rock and Roll!