Deconstructors write no gospels.
~ Frank Kermode
In 2006 notable intellectual, if sometimes crank, Jamie Smith argued in Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? for a calm down for the crescendo of Christian hysteria around so-called postmodernism. Introducing Jacques Derrida, Francois Lyotard, and Michele Foucault, he argued that while none would want to be swallowed whole by the church, they could prove insightful and even essential companions for the ails of modern evangelicalism. In their deconstructive accounts of power, knowledge, text, and authority they helped draw the evangelical eye not only to other perspectives, but also to the sometimes badly needed renovations in evangelicalism’s own house of modernity.
This is not that kind of argument about postliberalism.
In fact, if anything this argument underlines one of the underemphasized anxieties about postmodernism that Smith introduces in that book: that deconstruction, while sometimes wholesome, necessary, prudent, can also be a house swept clean, ready for “seven other spirits more wicked than itself” (Matthew 12:45).
Because, it seems to me, to begin somewhat unoriginally, that postmodernism and postliberalism are a closely related pair. In fact, let me punch that up a bit and put this argument into a formula:
Postmodernism | political left = postliberalism | political right
Before going deep into the intellectual patronage, let’s do a vibe check.
Both postmodernism and postliberalism are fundamentally deconstructive, they are about a critique of something that they are in some fashion meaningfully after. Such communities, if they could be called that, can hardly be constructively similar because they are about – fundamentally – what they are against. They agree, not unlike in the spirit of today’s political factions, on what they hate but not on what they love. So, of course it’s true that postmodernism’s balance sheet is packed full with all kinds of craziness, but then the same can be said for postliberalism.
Further, they each have a kind of emotional arc: there is a permeating sense of visceral betrayal. Deconstruction happens often when a thing we trusted, that was solid, that was our ground, is moved out from under us. We are disoriented. We are sometimes angry. We are often sad. But we are also resentful and feel betrayed. This thing we were told was solid ground, on which we stood but a moment ago, was never as neutral, or solid, or safe as we thought. It turned out to be prejudiced. It turned out to be vaporous. It turned out to be dangerous.
That’s a vibe that postmodernism and postliberalism share.
I also think there is a rather similar intellectual pedigree to what we might call modernity and liberalism. Charles Taylor would probably fail to separate them at all, calling both intrinsic to his modern moral order in his ponderous, widely recognized, but less widely read A Secular Age. The two are hardly separable in an intellectual sense, in their views of human nature, knowledge, even morality (optionally transcendent as it may be).
In fact, when I read the complaints of famous postliberals like Patrick Deneen about liberalism I often find I could substitute modernity into the complaint and it comes out sounding more or less the same. If anything, modernity is the more sweeping category, since liberalism – at least as a political philosophy – could be conceived of as a narrowly technical tradition of the management of political power as, for example, Yuval Levin does. Further, liberalism has intrinsic to it a set of limiting principles – checks and balances, transparency, rule of law, separation of powers, etc- which modernity does not strictly address. But this tends not to be the liberalism that postliberals are speaking about. Or, if it is, they argue that such a limited definition of liberalism is naïve in its assumption that a whole worldview does not underlie these technical principles, and will not over time absorb the whole of society and culture into itself. So, in fact, the postliberals cast liberalism as something more like modernity: a whole world and life view, or – at least - a worldvision.
Whether we agree with the above or not is less relevant than noticing that this makes postmodernism and postliberalism remarkably similar. They are deconstructive approaches to the modern moral order that want in some meaningful way to be appreciably post the assumptions of that order which have, on some level, proved to them prejudicial, vaporous, and dangerous.
This is a real-life horseshoe, then, but one that is better explained by the experience of politics and economics across the different constituencies of the so-called American left and right. It was the left, in Vietnam, the collapse of Bretton Woods, the stagflation and deglobalization of the 1970s, that found their comfort in the European continentalists. The right retreated to something more like Reagan, hardly postmodern at all, hardly deconstructive. But the combination of a security shock (9/11), an economic shock (the sub-prime mortgage crisis), and the cultural and identity shocks of the pre-pandemic and then pandemic world, drove the political right into the same set of conclusions the political left reached 50-years ago: postliberalism is the right-wing version of left-wing postmodernism.
Does it matter? Well, for one I think this helps group the movements in a way that makes sense of their sometimes-startling affinities, including their somewhat disconcerting fixation on the Jews. They are both populist in their mistrust of power and elites (also where Jews come in), which is a core premise of any deconstructive school.
But perhaps the main point is these movements are not entirely intellectual. They are lagging rather than leading indicators. I do not mean very smart people are not in them; they are. What I mean is that these movements are a vibe, a feeling, especially of betrayal, and often of dispossession, sadness, rage. It may sound very intellectual, but the streams that feed that river are often more personal, more vocational, more intimately familial, more self-referential. Postliberalism is an experience and feeling put into argument. It was not an intellectual argument first. It’s about how liberalism and modernity were never neutral (which is true), but it’s also about how that betrayal becomes the focal point for why we can’t buy a house, or have more kids, or find someone to marry at all. It is about dislocation, disorientation. It is a mood.
And it’s a mood we have been in before. The political left, God willing, will find their way out of it, and make a constructive case for the goods of American life. No one is saying there are not evils nestled into American life that must still be exorcised. But exorcism is the beginning, not the end of the story. The same we can pray will be true for the political right and its dalliance into postliberalism. America is not a country of unrepentant racist imperialist thugs, anymore than it is a country of smutty, decadent patsies, losers who must rise up and reclaim a past that never existed. Both postmodernism and postliberalism have done their deconstructions. They’ve burned what they can to the ground. They’ve had their revolutions.
Now the real work of reformation begins.