Secretary of State Marco Rubio travelled to Munich this month and articulated a possible foundation for a deeper trans-Atlantic friendship.
Rubio invoked ancient bonds that would connect the United States to Europe “not just economically” but “spiritually” and “culturally.” He said America’s roots in Europe constituted “a sacred inheritance,” made of “memories, and traditions, and the Christian faith of our ancestors.”
Western civilization, the true bond between Europe and the U.S., according to Rubio, includes ideas such as individual freedom and liberal democracy, and it also includes Shakespeare, Mozart, and Judeo-Christian values.
The New York Times would have none of this outmoded talk.
Rubio, scolded the New York Times’s correspondent in Munich, “tried to soothe a year of friction between the United States and its trans-Atlantic allies …. but wrapped it in historical and cultural ties that seemingly exclude large sections of the current European population.”
You see, Europe is increasingly secular, and the immigrants are non-Western and non-Christian. Thanks to this secularization and mass immigration, Western civilization needs to take a back seat, we are told.
To a reader of even slightly conservative bent, that seems like a big strike against free migration, against multinationalism, against secularization, and against multiculturalism.
Vice President JD Vance, shortly after winning the election in 2024, approvingly quoted the villain from a Cormac McCarthy novel, who asked a victim right before murdering him, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
If your agenda of openness and pluralism has made Mozart and Christianity obsolete, maybe the openness wasn’t so good. The New York Times’s Munich report struck an inadvertent blow in favor of postliberalism.
Postliberalism is an attitude, maybe a philosophy, on the ascent for the past decade. Conservative professor Patrick Deneen wrote Why Liberalism Failed in 2016, and Vance has associated himself with the “postliberal” Right.
“Liberal” here doesn’t mean supporting abortion and high taxes, while opposing guns and President Donald Trump. The liberalism that the postliberals want to discard is a broader philosophy.
The boundaries of this broader liberalism are generally agreed to include individualism, free enterprise, democracy, pluralism, and equality. If you’ve read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, you recognize these liberal ideals as the defining traits of our country.
Liberalism has made the world richer, more peaceful, and more tolerant. But liberalism hasn’t been the only force for good in the West. Judaism and Christianity have built and inspired traditions, art, and communities. Separately, Greek and Roman ideas of virtue have formed Western souls for millennia.
When assessing the effect of liberalism, we need to examine both costs and benefits. The postliberals emphasize the costs and downplay the benefits. The dedicated liberals — mainstream conservatives, libertarians, and some left-liberals — are so repulsed by postliberalism that they often refuse to grant that liberalism has done harm.
Any conservative, and anyone who loves America, ought to stay away from both extremes. Likewise, anyone who wants to save classical liberalism — equality, democracy, pluralism, free enterprise, et cetera — ought to acknowledge its harms.
Today’s epidemic of loneliness is a fruit of liberalism, because liberalism, along with the good it does, dissolves lasting bonds between people. When liberalism expands into all corners of our lives, it severs us from the past. It severs us from our neighbors. Tocqueville predicted this.
Most consequentially, liberalism wears away our little platoons. The spirit of democracy, when it spills out of government and into our social arrangements, “not only [makes] each man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants from him and separates him from his contemporaries; it constantly leads him back toward himself alone and threatens to finally confine him wholly in the solitude of his own heart.”
There is, after all, something illiberal about small, voluntary, local institutions of civil society.
They are often exclusive. Progressive critics constantly attack religious schools and other private schools as “unaccountable,” which sounds crazy, considering public school bureaucracies, until you realize they mean “accountable only to their members, not to the populace as a whole.” In this way, a private club is undemocratic. What’s more, some organizations are internally undemocratic — consider a Catholic parish.
Many organizations exist, borrowing a term, to cling to religion or old traditions, things that liberalism can wear away if given access.
These are the organic “associations” Tocqueville admired while visiting the U.S. These are the intermediate institutions that give us meaning, belonging, and connection. Liberalism, as it becomes all-encompassing, erodes these institutions and pulls us out of community and into isolation.
Liberalism also erases local differences. The spirit that demands equality will disdain having one law or norm somewhere for some people and another law or norm one county over. You see this in how often modern politicians deride the notion that “the accident of where you were born” should make any difference.
This liberal attitude, of course, creeps into disdain for borders — “imaginary lines,” some liberals call them. Rubio in Munich aptly described the liberal hope “that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood … and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.”
Liberalism is about giving people choices in all aspects of life, and it can inculcate a rejection of the unchosen. For this reason, liberalism, steamrolling the power of faith, family, and tradition, has given us the sexual revolution, the decline in marriage, the collapse in birth rates, and, more recently, gender ideology.
Our public schools today are a crucial arena where liberalism has won the day, but this hasn’t resulted in a real pluralism or some sort of value-free, reading-writing-and-arithmetic education, which would be impossible. Our schools instead reject all organized religion and preach in its place a new dogma intended to liberate children from the norms they may have inherited from their parents, culture, community, or faith.
Where does this all lead?
The loneliness epidemic, the baby bust, growing political polarization, rising political violence, and a million other modern maladies could be traced to unchecked liberalism. To see unchecked liberalism’s bitter fruits, you could zoom in on the story that began at a 2021 school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia.
A father was called a domestic terrorist by the U.S. attorney general’s office and prosecuted by the district attorney because he got furious at the school board for covering up the rape of his daughter. The cover-up happened because the rapist was a boy in a skirt, and admitting that could derail the schools’ agenda of pushing an ideology that includes changing your children’s gender and not telling you about it.
If liberalism brought us to this, of what use was liberalism?
Not every pathology of the 21st century is the fruit of liberalism, but surely, while creating salutary openness and wealth, liberalism has eroded faith, family, and community in the West.
The postliberals, such as Deneen, perceive that liberalism is a force opposed to faith, family, and community. Sometimes they jump to the conclusion that, say, Christian life and liberalism are incompatible.
But “opposed” doesn’t imply “incompatible.” They are in tension, sure. But if you’re a Christian, you know that everything in this world is in tension with your deepest beliefs. Christ promised as much, and Saint Paul told us not to be conformed to our age. Furthermore, conservatives must accept tension as part of life, and not demand that the world all cohere under human logic or ideology.
There’s an available synthesis of the postliberal critique and the desire to save liberalism: Christianity and liberalism are opposed in an architectural sense — as in a dome or arch. Some cultures tilt too far toward tradition, religion, authority, or family — think Iran or 20th-century Sicily. Europe and the U.S. lean too far toward liberalism.
JESSE JACKSON WAS NOT CONTROVERSIAL, OR LIBERAL, ACCORDING TO THE OBITUARIES
The postliberals are correct that we need to push back. We need to build up the old virtues so that they can counterbalance liberalism. But they are wrong to throw out liberalism altogether.
Liberalism can crush church, family, or tradition, but it can also prop it up. This might not please the radicals who see the death of the West as progress, but it may save the things most worth saving.