Faithful to What?

The Spectator ran an article recently arguing that libertarianism is dead. Nobody serious, according to the Spectator, still believes in free markets or unqualified liberty. Everyone, according to the Spectator, understands that markets need to be used for the “common good,” and that people exist not for their own selfish needs but for the “common good” as well. Supposedly, even Marco Rubio, the great savior of the Enlightenment Cause, understands that the days of liberty have come to their logical end, and that the American Experiment has failed.

J. D. Vance, of course, believes this. He just published a whole book titled Communion about it. The American Experiment has supposedly failed to provide the “common good,” and thus we need to rebuild the United States into something else.

Interestingly, the United States is also the richest and most powerful country in human history, and it just hit its highest mark ever for inflation-adjusted income, regardless of whether measured by average income or median income. Apparently, the Spectator does not consider that relevant when discussing the “common good,” but it sounds pretty good to me.

As someone running a website called The Daily Libertarian, color me what the Spectator calls “unserious.” I don’t want to give the Spectator the power to define the “common good,” and nor do I want to give that to J. D. Vance. I still think we each have a right to define what “good” means in our own, individual lives.

But that does not mean the Spectator is entirely wrong. Ben Shapiro, for example, now uses “a fishhook,” or even, “a horseshoe” to denote the left-right political spectrum, with the political right beginning to look very much like the political left once you move far enough over.

I don’t generally disagree with Ben Shapiro, but, in this case, I disagree a great deal. I think the correct left-right spectrum runs from totalitarianism on the left to anarchy on the right, and though one can argue that Karl Marx believed communism would lead to a state without government, Marx’s vision was hardly anarchy. Marx believed communism would organize itself in such a way that government would become unnecessary, but that’s a self-sustaining organization, which is very different from anarchy.

The political left-right spectrum still stands with totalitarianism on the extreme left, and anarchy on the extreme right. This spectrum only captures one aspect of political philosophy, but it is the most important one as it is the one that distinguishes types of government based on power.

There are other forms of political philosophy. Human beings aren’t sovereign atoms. We inherit obligations before we are capable of choosing them. We inhabit a culture and inherit a language. Civilization requires individuals who voluntarily shoulder responsibilities they never invented, so the question is for what things is government responsible, and for what things we as citizens bear some responsibility outside of government.

This brings us back to the Spectator’s statement that even Marco Rubio understands that capitalism must be “common-good capitalism.” Rubio believes individuals are generally free to define and pursue the good in their own lives, and while he does believe the government has a legitimate role in maintaining the economic and social conditions necessary for the “common good,” he believes in doing so fully within our Constitutional framework.

I go further than Rubio. I  believe that we all have the right to define what is “good” in our own lives, and that the “common good” is the organizing framework within which we are free to do so. In other words, a free market is the “common good,” with the government’s role limited to keeping the rules fair.

To me, the government only has two roles in the economy:

1. To promote and protect market efficiencies, and
2. To provide those legitimate societal needs that run counter to market efficiencies.

The first role is the primary one, and even when performing the second role (which reflects societal needs—not individual or group needs), the government should always act in ways that keep the markets as efficient as possible—and civil, through a court system which mediates lawsuits. The second role includes things such as police and fire protection, national defense, and building roads. Ensuring that the environment is not polluted would also qualify, although again, the goal is to minimize market intrusions and not to take over industries.

I also agree that there is such a thing as the “common good.” I just don’t want the government to define it, as doing so presupposes enough power to create it. I also think those who blame individualism for the end of the “common good” are missing the mark. Individualism inevitably leads to the concept of “your rights end where mine begin,” which is reciprocal, implying a morality of equality under the law and of mutual benefit. It allows a government to create and enforce laws that prevent us from infringing on one another’s rights, but it also presupposes that there are some things that are immoral but outside the power of government to mandate.

Some sin is outside the purview of government, and must be left for God to judge.

I like to think if I had a conversation with Rubio, he would largely agree with me and would try to fit his “common good” into my framework. I think Ben Shapiro probably would agree as well, so let us look back at his fishhook metaphor, as I think comparing Rubio to Vance may prove Shapiro wrong.

I see what Shapiro sees, but what he sees as the “turn” in the right is actually a fork in the road leading to the alt-right. Understanding Ben’s point requires understanding what the alt-right is, exactly, and once we draw that distinction I think we can safely place Rubio on the right side of the spectrum, whereas when we look at Vance, we may see something else entirely.

“Alt-right” is a phrase concocted by white nationalist Richard Spencer, to denote what he saw as an “alternative to the right” in opposition to the left. In other words, it was not a part of the actual right, but something altogether different.

I did a long-form essay on the alt-right which I recommend. For now, suffice it to say that there can be multiple alternatives to the right, and that Richard Spencer’s white nationalism is but one of them. Really, the left created Richard Spencer’s alternative by focusing so heavily on intersectionality—and predominantly on racial intersectionality with white people as the oppressive majority—that they all but asked for a white supremacist or white nationalist alternative to emerge. The more the left looked at white people and said, “You are the bad guys,” the more they also were encouraging a mirror-image of themselves to emerge that went beyond saying, “No, we are not.”

I have bad news for the political left, but Richard Spencer or Nick Fuentes (the more recent version) would fit in very well on the political left if they only flipped their preferred racial hierarchy. As I said in my article on the alt-right, if you “blindfold Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nick Fuentes, they might fall in love.”

I also said, “Nick Fuentes’s followers are the political equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys. We need to speak to them firmly, but with compassion, as some of them can likely be saved. The actual right believes their beliefs to be immoral, but we separate the sin from the sinner and offer redemption to those who repent,” and that sentiment follows not just Nick Fuentes’ followers, but also followers of other versions of the alt-right—including J. D. Vance.

I recently did a book review of Vance’s Communion in which I called his book “a political justification, disguised as a Catholic apologetic, disguised as a memoir.” I called it a “political justification” as he lays the groundwork to justify his version of the alt-right, but stops short of making any specific policy proposals. I wanted to be fair to his book, so I did not go any deeper into post-liberalism than he did, but this is a critical topic as we head toward the 2028 primaries, so I wanted to write an article specific to Vance’s post-liberalism as well. 

We need to understand those who are running, and, in the case of Vance, we need to understand that he is, in some ways, much more like Richard Spencer than he is like Marco Rubio.

Richard Spencer’s version of the alt-right is racial first. He envisions a white ethno-state and has been remarkably open about the fact that such a state would require replacing the American political order rather than conserving it. Spencer has even described his vision as “revolutionary.” He is not particularly interested in preserving American constitutional conservatism because he does not believe the American constitutional system can produce the racially organized society he wants.

Spencer is also not particularly Christian. In fact, Christianity presents something of a problem for his worldview. Christianity is universal: salvation is available regardless of race, nationality, or ethnicity, and the Church transcends all three. Spencer’s organizing principle is instead racial identity. The nation exists principally for a particular people, and political and economic institutions should serve that people.

Spencer ties race to culture. He says the two things are inseparable, and calls for different races to live separately from one another. Nick Fuentes represents an important evolution of that idea. Fuentes retains racial identity as an important component of his politics, but combines it with Catholic traditionalism, Christian nationalism, and an “America First” political identity. Where Spencer is comfortable trying to build a new political movement, Fuentes has been far more interested in capturing and transforming the existing American right.

I even had a handful of Fuentes’ “groypers” reach out to me through Facebook a few months ago. They were remarkably polite, but they were trying to see if I could be brought on board with their movement. I tried to convert them to actual conservatism instead, and once they realized I was not interested in changing sides, only in getting them to do so, they promptly left.

Fuentes has said that he “is a fan of Stalin,” and that “it’s actually courageous to support Stalin.” He’s also said that Hitler was “really f—king cool.” He presents himself as conservative, traditionalist, Catholic, and nationalist, even though the political system he advocates would be very different from traditional American constitutional conservatism—something totalitarian and totally unafraid of killing the masses to get and use political power. He grasp of what you might call “behavioral traditionalism” is also rather lax to say the least.

This makes Fuentes particularly interesting for purposes of understanding J. D. Vance. Spencer makes race the organizing principle and has little use for Christianity when Christianity gets in its way. Fuentes attempts to combine racial nationalism with Catholic Christian nationalism. Vance removes the racial component altogether—even while he is sometimes loath to offend those who champion it—but retains Christian nationalism, Catholicism, hostility to individualism, skepticism of free markets, and the belief that economic policy should be used deliberately to rebuild a preferred national culture.

I honestly really liked J. D. Vance when Trump picked him as a running mate. Not only is he highly intelligent and a master debater—one who destroyed Tim Walz without needing to insult him—but he is also a fellow Marine. I assumed that, as a Republican, he had political views similar to my own. I saw him as a great communicator and thought we might have found the next Ronald Reagan.

I was wrong. 

J. D. Vance is a Catholic “post-liberal.” “Post-liberalism” is not post-leftism, but post classical liberalism, or post-Enlightenment. One might even call J. D. Vance a post-conservative, as he wants to do away with everything a true conservative wants to preserve.

J. D. Vance does not hide the fact that he is a post-liberal. He has publicly identified himself with the “post-liberal right,” and his conversion to Catholicism in 2019 gave him an intellectual framework through which to reinterpret the economic and social problems he had already spent years discussing. Vance wrote that he had been looking for a worldview capable of understanding human behavior as simultaneously individual and social, as well as moral and structural. Catholicism provided one.

Vance’s economic views follow. He is skeptical of free trade, globalization, large corporations, and the idea that voluntary market outcomes are inherently best. He has argued that social conservatism needs a broader “vision of political economy, and the common good.” Catholic post-liberals similarly argue that economic freedom must be judged according to whether it produces the kind of families, communities, and nation they believe society requires. Markets cease to be mechanisms through which individuals primarily pursue their own interests, and become instruments whose outcomes can be encouraged, discouraged, or redirected according to a prior conception of the “common good.”

The “common good” is a recurring theme in post-liberal circles. We should be concerned about that, as it requires someone to define what that phrase means. Vance does not want to reduce government power. He wants to broadly expand it, and then to use that power to rebuild our country into his personal vision of what he thinks society should look like.

Vance’s views on personal liberty follow. Post-liberals believe liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy has produced atomization: weaker families, weaker communities, declining religious authority, collapsing birthrates, and people increasingly detached from duties to one another. Vance consequently emphasizes obligation, family, community, nation, and social stability. Post-liberals view government as paternalistic—almost like a national parent—and want it to have broad powers to manage and control the population. This is in direct opposition to the concept of personal liberty.

This does not necessarily mean that Vance has endorsed Catholic integralism, in which political authority and the Catholic Church would formally cooperate in governing society. He has not identified himself as an integralist, and he has acknowledged both America’s religious pluralism and the political reality that many Catholic teachings would never find majority support. But he has said that his conception of the optimal state follows Catholic social teaching, has associated himself with prominent Catholic post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen, and he has spoken approvingly about replacing the existing institutional order with one directed toward what post-liberals call the “common good.”

There’s that phrase again, and that last point is particularly important. Vance’s post-liberalism is not just the argument that Americans should voluntarily become more religious, have more children, attend church, and rebuild their communities. He has argued that political power and institutions have a role to play toward molding society in his image. He has spoken of being “ruthless” in exercising political power and of taking control of institutions, including universities, so they can force the public to submit to Vance’s vision.

And the word “ruthless” implies force, when needed. 

Vance is right that our institutions have become compromised and have brought our society to the verge of ruin. Indeed, this fact is the whole basis of post-liberalism, but this was done intentionally by groups subversive to the United States. It started with Antonio Gramsci’s call for a “long walk through the institutions,” and culminated with Chinese and Qatari funding of our universities. We have allowed our enemies to “teach” generations of Americans to hate America, and, now that some of them are in political office, actively work to destroy our nation. Add to that what I call “Long-Tail Activism,” and you have a recipe for civilizational collapse. 

The solution in some cases is to fix the institutions. In other cases, it is to throw them out and build new ones.

What I would tell Vance, and other post-liberals, is that individualism did not tear the social contract up. Intersectionality and post-modernism did that—and those are not a part of the conservative movement. This happened as soon as intersectional groups centered around sin moved from “My sin should be legal,” to “You have no right to classify what I am doing as sin. If you don’t like it, you are the sinner. I demand that you accept my sin as virtuous.”

This is the oldest lie of all: the serpent did not just tell Eve that the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would not kill her. Eating that fruit was, at the time, the only sin available to Eve—the serpent told Eve that committing that sin would make her closer to God and would, in fact, make her like God.

The oldest lie is that sin is good.

Vance has cited St. Augustine as an important influence and has said Catholic social teaching helped shape his understanding of what an optimal state should look like. Catholic social thought gives him a vocabulary of duties, subsidiarity, solidarity, family, community, moral order, and the “common good” that is fundamentally different from the language of individual autonomy and laissez-faire economics.

This is why describing Vance simply as being “farther right” than a Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, or even Thomas Massie is false. On economics, individualism, and the proper purposes of political power, Vance has not continued traveling farther along the traditional American conservative road. He has taken a fork into a completely different direction, and one that is in many ways heading back toward the political left. His post-liberalism rejects both the libertarian assumption that individuals should generally be left to order their own lives and the free-market assumption that economic outcomes should generally be left to voluntary exchange.

When Ben Shapiro says that the true political spectrum is like a fishhook or a horseshoe, he is referring to the way people like J. D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes seem to hook back toward the political left. He’s not imagining that, but he is mistaken to lump such people in with the political right. They are very much an alternative to it, relating to the political right only in that they hope to gain our support.

We should not give that to them.

America, in Vance’s telling, has lost family stability, religious belief, cultural confidence, national solidarity, and the moral framework necessary to sustain these things. Government, according to Vance, cannot sit back and just hope those things return. Political and economic power must instead be used to help recreate the conditions in which the preferred culture can flourish, and, to the degree that this is incompatible with personal liberty, personal liberty should not exist.

This is where Vance’s similarity to other versions of the alternative right becomes evident. Richard Spencer also rejects individualism and free-market capitalism. Spencer also believes America has lost a coherent national identity and that the economy should serve a larger national project. The difference is the identity around which that project is organized. Spencer focuses on race. Vance focuses on Christianity, with Catholicism as the philosophical framework through which Christianity is understood.

And Nick Fuentes is the bridge connecting Spencer and Vance, with a focus on both Catholicism and race.

None of this is traditional American conservatism. It is an alternative to it, and one that is in many ways very much the opposite of actual American conservatism.

To the degree that J. D. Vance represents the future of the Republican Party, the Spectator may have a point that libertarianism is dead, but I don’t think that’s the case. I, in fact, gave a speech to the Libertarian Party of Oakland County, Michigan, a number of years ago, in which I argued that, while only about 22% of the population identifies as “libertarian,” when asked a series of questions on political views, the number of people who broadly subscribe to libertarian beliefs can run as high as 60%. I told them that if they really want to move the needle, they need to abandon running as a Libertarian Party, and need to instead help push the conservative movement into a more libertarian-leaning direction. The problem with the Libertarian Party is that every member believes themself to be the only “true libertarian.” As such, they never even back their own candidates.

I was not invited back, but nor was I wrong. Ron Paul proved it by building a powerful movement within the Republican Party. Ron Paul—regardless of his views, including anti-Jewish ones—did more over the two presidential elections he ran as a Republican than the entire Libertarian Party has done over its entire lifetime, including when he ran under their banner.

Libertarianism as a word may be dead, but, as a belief structure, it is still alive and well. We conservatives need to stand firm to it as classical liberals, opposing tyranny in all forms, even when dressed in conservative garb.

If we vote for someone who talks the talk on social issues, but who wants to radically expand the power of the state, we will run headlong into Shapiro’s fish hook, but it won’t be a new political model. It will be a literal fish hook connected to a literal fishing pole, and it will be stuck through our collective mouths.

The best way not to get reeled in is not to get hooked in the first place. I reject the alt-right, and I reject those in it.

I reject J. D. Vance.

And J. D., If you read this, I am open to seeing you repent. It is not too late to embrace actual conservatism again. You are a Marine after all, as am I, and our motto is Semper fidelis, or “Always faithful.”

The question for you seems to be, “Faithful to what?”