Review of Post-Liberalism by Matt Sleat (Polity, 2025) and Against Post-Liberalism: ‘Why Family, Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left by Paul Kelly (Polity, 2026)
The Right is often unsure what time it wants to live in. And I’m not just talking about how online conservatives wax nostalgic about 1990s memorabilia as though a classic Pizza Hut is their Proustian madeleine, a symbol of everything woke took from them.
In his 2009 essay “Progress and Memory: Making Whole Our Historical Sense,” self-described postliberal Patrick Deneen described progressives as myopically oriented to the future, liberals to the present, and reactionaries to the nostalgic past. Only conservatives were capable of restoring the “temporal continuity” between past, present, and future.
Flash-forward a few years later, and Deneen has replaced soothing metaphors of continuity and healing with calls for regime change, the title of his 2023 book, and assertions that what America needs is something “far more revolutionary” than even overthrowing the government. One is reminded of Corey Robin’s insightful observation in The Reactionary Mind that no matter how much conservatives speak of the past and the present, their politics is always oriented toward the future.
For the Right, the present is corrupt and debased; the recent past, with its permissive attitudes around race and sexuality, is responsible for today’s criminal decadence; only the future can offer a new beginning.
Under the Trump administration, an assortment of conservative and far-right organizations are currently in the process of mapping out the path to this reactionary future. Among these groups, the most intellectually sophisticated tradition, spearheaded by academics like Deneen and Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, is postliberalism.
Postliberals long for the kind of establishment respectability that used to be integral to the Right’s image before groypers like Nick Fuentes, who reject the idea of…
Auteur: Matt McManus
