Postliberal Common Good Politics:

(A)Manifesto

This week approaches my year anniversary on Substack. I wandered at the beginning. I was an early banner carrier for postliberal thought via my study of theology at Notre Dame. I found a positive Substack vein to mine in the Common Good Constitutionalism of Adrian Vermeule. Professor Vermeule’s scholarship allowed me to own my citizenship in the United States. I had mistakenly thought that the Constitution formed a liberal democracy. I had no interest in the philosophical, ethical, and political mess that arises from liberalism of any sort, progressive or libertarian.

An academic dean once gave me a form to withdrawal my citizenship from the United States due to my postliberalism.

Professor Vermeule taught me differently. I can own my citizenship in a common good Republic — what I now think the Constitution forms.

I have yet to plumb the French tradition upon which Prof. Vermeule draws. My postliberalism is Anglo-American in origins. I have tried to investigate, analyze, and defend postliberal common good political theory against its cultural despisers throughout this past year.

As I approach my Substack anniversary, I want to lay out, in a systematic fashion, what I think after a year of reading and writing. I have wanted to defend postliberal common good thought in a context of liberal knee-jerk smears. I’ve wanted to thicken the historical and philosophical and theological manifestations of the tradition. I’ve sought precision in thought and language — whether I have achieved that or not.

The common good tradition has an important role within the Roman Catholic tradition. Such permits the liberal intelligentsia to activate its historical anti-Roman Catholicism — the last acceptable prejudice. I have wanted enfold Roman Catholics in their own tradition but widen it for others. Thomas Aquinas engaged both Maimonides and Ibn Sina to compose the Summa Theologicae. And Plato and Plotinus come before all.

I’d like to offer four theses. Four theses is not a manifesto — it’s (a)manifesto, a non-manifesto manifesto.

(Please forgive me, I can’t resist the puns that postmodern styles gave me. It’s the only part of postmodernity that still embraces me.)

Sure four theses are not as dramatic or extensive as ninety-five theses on the Wittenberg Door.

But that’s okay. Luther’s not a hero in the story I tell. He’s at best a scatologically obsessed tragic figure. Recent historical scholarship has shown that academics have overstressed Luther’s significance anyway. Brad Gregory among others has ably argued, the Protestant Reformation unleashed the secularity to which liberalism has both contributed and in which it has thrived.

Let’s take a first anniversary review of four theses that I have formed concerning postliberal common good political theory.

I. Postliberal common good politics is only contingently postliberal.

I am postliberal only because liberalism names the marinade that has soaked both the contemporary North Atlantic professional managerial elite, and through them, the general populace.

Liberalism as a concept has a much briefer history than liberals claim. It has not proven a stable concept but taken many manifestations. “Liberalism” did not exist when the “framers” produced and ratified the Constitution of the United States. References to John Locke dropped off precipitously after the American Revolution — and he never named his political system as “liberal.” Nor did “liberalism” exist when the French revolted to solve their national financial problems in 1789.

The liberalism to which I am “post” reached prominence in the 1960s and has dominated North Atlantic societies since. It’s deeply related to expressive individualism and the influence of Hayek and neo-liberalism. The fall of the Soviet Union brought about increased liberal hubris. This hubris masked the social rot that contemporary neo-liberalism had begun to produce. Of course, the professional managerial elite still argue for a deeper, more thorough liberalism to solve the problems created by liberalism.

Just like Will Ferrell their solution is always more cowbell. Sigh.

Conservatives have long specialized in political declensionist stories. So have those who study economic inequality on the left. Liberalism has never functioned without thinkers contesting it — which, of course, led to their marginalization. Liberals established liberalism in a liberal Overton Schema: Marxism marked the unacceptable radical left and “fascism” the unacceptable radical right.

Amnesia about the common good politics characterized North Atlantic societies.

Declensionist stories continue to arise. Peter Turchin has generated a complex systems approach to historical cycles. The USA currently manifests three major manifestations of decline: (1) elite overproduction (i.e., a university graduate of a University of California political science program who works as a valet for a hotel that I met — law school entailed too much debt); (2) immiseration (you probably know the statistics, if you don’t experience it yourself); and (3) state breakdown (do I have to mention the most recent LA riots or Minnesota assassinations?).

I identify with Turchin’s analysis. Liberalism cannot solve the problems that it creates. Political economy by the “invisible hand” has failed. The multipolar world has left hegemonic liberalism behind — and produced an improvement in non-liberal society’s temporal goods. Liberalism has left moral decay in the celebration of ethical libertarianism. I fear that the liberal elite will not release their global hegemony without horrific destruction, call it the liberal “Sampson Option.”

Never confuse me with a neo-conservative. I’ll take Tulsi Gabbard any day over Anne Applebaum.

I am postliberal, not necessarily an antiliberal. “Liberal” was a Christian virtue once — kind and generous. My postliberalism rejects liberalism as a political-economic system, but it does not reject liberal as a virtue nor the concept liberty per se. I reject the liberal reduction of “liberty” as the alleviation of coercion. True liberty entails the negative but for a positive end: to empower one to participate in a good that participates in the Good.

One can’t embrace a “liberty” of the will that excludes a liberty to achieve the Good.

My postliberalism refuses the reductionism that the liberalism entails. I remain postliberal because liberalism is false, even if regnant. Liberalism is the exception, not the common good political tradition.

My postliberalism is a preliberalism.

II. Postliberal Common Good Politics first and foremost requires a simple, incomprehensible, unsurpassable, universal Good.

Lloyd Gerson’s life work on the Platonic system has become indispensable to my postliberal common good politics. I heard Prof. Gerson give a paper at a professional meeting. I have followed him ever since, even as I have much more work to do to master his literary corpus, let alone Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Plotinus’s.

Gerson has retrieved the consensus reading of Plato and his reception from its 19th, 20th, and 21st century reductions. He is not alone. Ryszard Legutko has joined him in the task.

Liberalism places practical reason as the “first science” — seen, perhaps, in the prominence of Richard Rorty’s pragmaticism. Such contemporary reductionism attempts to salvage Kant’s project of practical reason as the only means to transcendence.

Kant’s project has failed. His universal, anthropological, transcendental categories were neither universal, anthropological, or transcendental but colonial, racist, and political. Later “liberals” tried to use him to legitimate liberalism as universally true. When this failed, people have moved to pragmaticism to legitimate liberalism as “the best system of political economics.” Thinkers have tried to reduce the Good to ethics (values) and then politics. Politics becomes the “first science.”

Liberalism may not be true but at least it helps everyone prosper — except it doesn’t.

Politics is not an end in itself. Politics unsuspended from Transcendence will implode into nihilism. Nietzsche’s aristocratic liberal nihilism reached the logical end of this anti-nihilistic nihilism — the creative destruction of a reductive evolutionary biology on the way to the Super Human.

The British Parliament adoption of medical suicide and legal abortion anytime before birth reveals the nihilistic end of liberalism.

Thomas Aquinas recognizes that theology remains first and foremost the basic science before ethics at the very beginning of his Summa. He was and is right. Ethics cannot sustain itself without a prior commitment to a transcendent Good. Elisabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch showed why. If one begins and ends in ethics outside of metaphysics, ontology, and theology, ethics (and thus politics) collapses into itself.

Theology/ontology/metaphysics must come before politics. Politics must come before ethics which must come before law in order to sustain the order that human and nonhuman systems presuppose and enhance.

Gerson’s merit is to retrieve this basic presupposition in the Platonic text and scholarship. He describes the systemic nature within Plato’s dialogues that refutes the materialism, relativism, and naturalism that contemporary North Atlantic systems presuppose.

My postliberal Common Good politics is a plea for a genuine Transcendence that both assumes and relativizes the temporal common goods participation in that which exceeds it. The contemporary use of “transcendence” has become obfuscated to often imply a transcendence within immanence that keeps history flowing.

Thanks Hegel.

I am not speaking of such transcendence as a negation of immanence that leads to another progressive step along in immanence. I am speaking of a genuine transcendence in which goods find their Good non-competitively. The Good, which exceeds human comprehension and Being itself offers its Goodness in which the temporal good participates. The Good is not like the temporal realm — the Good has no potential, but brings together essence and existence as One.

Or as I like to say, the Good is like Prego — it’s in there!

To be is to be good through participation in the Good. The Good shares its necessary existence with that which exists contingently. Evil is not primary but a distortion, a lack of the gift that the Good gives to its temporal manifestations.

Gerson reads Plato and the Platonic tradition well. Plato’s system comes from Plato’s consistent rejection of ancient naturalisms. These naturalisms came to North Atlantic society’s through the “atomism” of the rediscovery of the Epicurean Lucretius. Like contemporary naturalism, ancient naturalisms committed to materialism, mechanism, nominalism, relativism, and skepticism. Regnant liberalism encases itself in contemporary naturalism/positivism. Naturalism becomes manifest in the positivism that runs from the sciences to law.

Postliberal common good politics is anti-naturalism (not anti-Nature!).

III. Postliberal Common Good politics orders a society towards the goods of peace, justice, and abundance as the three participate in the One, the Eternal Good.

The Common Good necessarily receives its warrant by its participation in the eternal Good. Politics must leave itself open to a realm in which it has no expertise: the Transcendent Good.

Liberalism claims to “bracket” questions of higher goods by excluding them from the “public realm” or politics. The exclusion, however, has a perverse end. With nothing “above it,” politics rises to the level of the highest good — a weight it cannot bear. With such goods viewed as outside rationality, violence ensues, either sublimated into election campaigns, protests within liberal democracies, or open warfare between the nations.

International relations provides no substitute for the law of nations, natural law applied to nations.

As John Milbank began his tome, Theology and Social Theory, “Once there was no secular.” Milbank was and is right. The “secular” as a distinct realm does not exist. The saeculum exists in which, until the coming of the Beatific Vision for all, we live in a realm in which both government jurisdiction and church jurisdiction exist, a temporal good ordered to the eternal Good. But the temporal and the eternal do not constitute independent realms. The common good participates in the eternal Good temporally within the created order — we live, and move, and have our Being in the temporal realm as a result of the abundance, overflowing surplus of the Good.

The Common Good must always remain opens to the eternal Good. In this sense, common good politics calls for a limited government that does not exceed its authority — like forcing priests to break the confidentiality of Confession. But this “limit” is not “libertarian.” The state has a positive role in ordering the temporal lives of its citizens to the abundance of life through participation in the Good. To quote a book title by Milbank, a “suspended middle” exists where the Common Good’s authority may not conflict with the eternal Good. In this “middle,” the authority of the state overlaps with the authority of the Revelation of the final End.

We cannot isolate the Common Good of politics from the Eternal Good of the Divine End of our lives. A hierarchy of goods exist, not in opposition to each other but with the temporal ordered to the eternal by reason. For instance, the church has no expertise to establish the mathematics of the curvature of space that we call gravity. And the state does not have any authority to tell the church when and where and how it must conduct the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. The state has no authority over Scripture for the baptized.

The common good must allow participation in the Eternal Good. If one collapses the Eternal Good into the Common Good, one loses Transcendence. Everything becomes a play within immanence. Utilitarianism, at best, will result. Utilitarianism, of course, always demands a sacrifice of the good from one section of the population to empower another section. Law becomes hyper-politicized and positivistic.

On the other hand, if one raises the Common Good as coterminous with the Eternal Good, one ends up with an authoritarian state that speaks far beyond its own expertise. Law becomes hyper-politicized and positivistic.

This is the trickiness of the logic of Common Good politics. The suspended middle becomes the ontological space in which law occurs. Law does have a pragmatic and positivist dimension according to specific historical traditions that shape a people. Yet it also entails reason’s participation in the natural law to form its people towards the oneness, simplicity, and transcendence of the Eternal Good.

One cannot pursue temporal injustice to participate in eternal Justice. One cannot pursue unjust violence, against the standards of just war, in order to achieve peace. One cannot starve or diminish a section of a government’s population in order to achieve the abundance of another segment.

The Common Good preserves the logic of “both/and” in its relationship to the Transcendent Good.

This middle, suspended from the Good as the origin of all things and reaching up to the Good as the end of all things, requires wisdom, discernment, formation, dialogue, openness, embracement of personal fallibility. It’s difficulty, however, does not mean that it is unattainable. I have tried to hold both “Superforecasters” and “cybernetic management” as models where humans actually do have the ability to achieve uniformity concerning the temporal good as it remains upon to the eternal Good."

The Good remains simultaneously transcendent AND immanent, with a variation in the intensity of participation between different levels of being.

IV. Postliberal Common Good politics is not of the Radical Right. Perhaps, defined well, it finds friends among the “New Right.”

If I am right about the above, I need to clarify: Postliberal Common Good politics is conservative, but not of the Right nor the alt-Right.

I cringe when I encounter the labels of “left” and “right.”

The usefulness of the metaphor has long passed its “good by” date. The parliament of pre-Revolutionary France in relationship to the king no longer serves any purpose. Postliberalisms usually receive the moniker “radical right.” The label signifies to the professional managerial class that they should not seek to understand those morally compromised positions.

The phrases “left” and “right” and “radical left” and “radical right” only cohere in an Overton Schema in which Communists represent the “extreme left”; Fascists “the radical right” and “progressive” and “conservative liberals” comprise the acceptable positions in between.

Postliberal Common Good Politics finds no place for itself in the liberal spectrum. The use of the metaphors just confuses people.

Postliberal Common Good Politics will prove “right wing” in matters of the family and sexual ethics.

Postliberal Common Good Politics will prove “left wing” in governmental support for such families.

Postliberal Common Good Politics will prove “right wing” in upholding the governmental responsibility to its citizens over immigrants.

Postliberal Common Good Politics will prove “left wing” in placing immigration within the complex system of border maintenance and situations within the sending and receiving countries.

Postliberal Common Good Politics will prove “right wing” in upholding Constitutional authority of the executive branch in the United States against “lawfare” attacks on this authority.

Postliberal Common Good Politics will prove “left wing” in upholding federal prerogatives over “state rights.”

Postliberal Common Good Politics will hear the grievances of the New Right but it will never capitulate to racial arguments over those of natural law and reason. It will contest “identity politics” of the left and the right.

In the wider political commentariat, I have found Sohrab Ahmari as closest to my assessment of policy choices.

Common Good Politics (and its first cousin, Common Good Constitutionalism) has the honor of inducing unbridled panic reactions by both libertarian (i.e., originalists) and liberal progressives. It refuses to confuse nostalgia for conservativism — which recognizes that the same policies/laws need interpreted to apply into new situations.

I refuses reductionalisms of all types; I become extremely skeptical when given policy choices that only have “either/or” options.

Liberals have recently recognized that “liberal heretics” exist — to their chagrin. They seek to throttle us by baseless categorization (i.e., “Radical Right,” “theocrats,” etc.). Labels do the work of the Robot in Lost in Space, “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger.” Such labeling circumvents the necessity to understand the great classical tradition of political and legal thought in Western Asia, North Africa, Europe, and North and South America.

Postliberal common good politics commits itself to substantial goods. It has no real stake in procedurism per se. Any process of politics, democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, can face its own perversions. The issue is not process so much as the substance — a bitter pill for liberals of the right or left to swallow.

Peace is not a goal of the radical right.

Justice is not a goal of the radical right.

Abundance is not a goal of the radical right.

The liberal heresy hunters would do better than to save their cheap rhetorical tricks where they can get away with it. Not here.

V. Conclusion

Postliberalisms are here. The world has gone multipolar. Liberal hegemony is over. Bombing Iran won’t change the situation. Postliberal societies currently outperform liberal societies in livability, not to mention in military parades.

Just don’t ask Ted Cruz to compare Washington DC to Moscow.

Liberalism remains unimaginative, on its back foot, reduced to trans performances in the Oregon House of Representatives.

I will press ahead with Postliberal Common Good politics. We need to start a wider movement, enfolding Common Good Constitutionalism and natural law legal reasoning within a broader cultural productions, history of philosophy and political philosophy, and wider dissemination, particularly educationally and to the professional managerial class. Perhaps we could start with a informed media that weeks to exceed the tired life/right Overton Schema.

We need to draw others toward the common good. I hope to establish the deep logics and history of this tradition. I would like for readers to embrace the goal of this Substack and to spread it. I hope this (non)manifesto may elicit some enthusiasm for the task. Merely to get the commentariat to ask, “Is it conducive for peace, justice, and abundance" would certainly provide a great victory for the Good.

Signs are that the classical tradition is awakening after a long slumber. In the late summer, James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo will release their two volume work, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, published by Encounter Books. The volumes are massive, and entail the price of almost two days of my wages as a laborer. Substack provides some wonderful voices such as The New Digest for legal affairs; The Library of Celaeno, for its wonderful syntheses of literature, history, and political/sociological commentary; the philosopher, Benjamin L. Smith and his Logos Letter, and Gary Houchens in education.

Friendship entails a common good or it is mere sentimentality. If these four theses are sound, it is time to join the conversation and the cause. I invite you to spread the news.