Postliberalism

I'm Sean Wilentz with my co-host, Sidney Blumenthal.

We've been talking here, um, about all sorts of things with the authors of the, uh, the brand new book, Why Postliberalism Failed.

Um, welcome back James Patterson and Thomas House.

It's good to be back.

As we were talking in, in, in part one, it struck me that there was a lot of, um, conspiratorial thinking that was going on here, uh, that these guys are, are, are, are, are addicted to that kind of thing.

Which brings me back to something that the book really does.

The book Why Postliberalism Failed, um, i- gets at in, in, in, in, in great detail, which is the history of all of this stuff.

I mean, a lot of people think that these postliberals are trying to bring back a kind of, what, medieval Catholic order, that we're going back to the ultramontanism, you know, from, from before the French Revolution and so forth, and that it's a kind of... that kind of reactionary movement.

This ideology directly targets the multicultural consensus governing Western democracy.

Post-liberalism seeks to dismantle open institutions and replace them with a reactionary state model.

Pluralism is swapped for an enforced singular cultural identity rooted in Western Christian heritage.

State authority is weaponized to promote a specific religious vision of the common good, overriding individual autonomy, dismantling secular administrative bodies, and purging educational institutions to re-establish traditional social hierarchies.