The Paradox of Left Conservatism: Reclaiming Postliberal Politics from the Right

by Adrian Pabst

In this article, Adrian Pabst discusses the collapse of liberal hegemony and the rise of postliberalism, and advocates for a left-wing postliberalism that can rival the dominance of its right-wing counterpart. His vision takes a holistic view of protectionism, pairing conservatism on immigration and integration with commitments to social protection and economic radicalism, mutual obligation, and solidarity. Pabst argues that this paradoxical combination of tradition and transformation is exactly what our moment calls for.

The West has already entered a postliberal era when liberalism is in retreat and no longer the hegemonic ideology or even the dominant framework. Donald Trump’s return to the White House confirms the emergence of new times led by the national-populist right in alliance with Silicon Valley plutocrats. Across the West, right-wing populist parties and movements are rising. Even when they are not winning elections, they are setting the political agenda as the mainstream is forced to respond to these insurgencies. A host of progressive policies—mass immigration, net zero, Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI), as well as gender self-identification—are being rejected by voters and dismantled by governments. The era of liberal hegemony has ended, and in the U.S. a new era is replacing progressive liberalism with libertarian market nationalism—to which this essay returns.

Where the Liberal Left Went Wrong

Established liberal-left politics is trapped by outdated progressive orthodoxies. Left liberalism seems simultaneously to be too fearful and too authoritarian and illiberal: free thinkers are cancelled, debate is stifled, old campaigns are relitigated, and lawfare against political opponents is deployed. Across much of the center-left, there is a longing for the politics of a dead era—radical individualism linked to maximal choice, unchecked markets associated with global free trade, and military interventions aimed at “regime change.”

The same left seems oblivious to the consequences of liberal ideology: the erosion of close bonds and community solidarity, the disintegration of families and civic associations leading to a steep increase in loneliness, the denunciation of all cultural inheritance and tradition, fast-rising economic inequality, and the disconnect of elites from ordinary citizens and their concerns. “Really existing” liberalism produces in practice the circumstances it originally assumed in theory by bringing about the “state of nature” conceptualized by Thomas Hobbes, in which “life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and there is a “war of all against all.” The hundreds of thousands of “deaths of despair” from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism in the U.S. each year linked to capitalism, and the polarization of Western societies as a result of identity politics are expressions of our contemporary Hobbesian condition.

The Emergence of a Postliberal Conservative Left

There is, however, another left that has emerged in recent years—a small-c conservative left that combines greater economic equality with social moderation. This strand of the left seeks a radical transformation of the economy (moving it away from neoliberalism) coupled with support for more traditional institutions and practices, such as the family, community, work, and patriotism. It does this, however, without discriminating against people who do not fully share these values. Left conservatism rejects the “culture wars” in favor of social reconciliation and unfettered capitalism in favor of more mutual markets—including mutual protectionism among trading partners. For example, the idea of “securonomics” developed by the former U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan attempted to envision a post-neoliberal model that overcomes the “Washington Consensus” of free trade and market fundamentalism, moving toward a system of reshoring industrial production and mutually beneficial trade and protection amongst allies.

The Biden Administration was too beholden to the liberal oligarchy on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, including donors such as the chairman of the travel site Expedia, Barry Diller, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, both of whom called for the sacking of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan for opposing mergers and acquisitions that exacerbate the capitalist concentration of wealth. Nevertheless, “securonomics,” together with wage increases and support for stronger unions, points in the direction of an economic model that can break decisively with the Thatcherite and Reaganite settlement. That requires strict limits on socially harmful population movements within and across countries as well as on speculative capital flows. As the U.K. Labour government is fast discovering, the left will only gain and retain power once it tackles the root cause of legal immigration—the capitalist demand for cheap skilled labor from abroad that undercuts domestic workers. Reducing immigration and reducing economic inequality are two sides of the same postliberal, non-capitalist coin.

One left-wing government has done just that. Led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the Danish social democrats have radically curtailed immigration while adopting a new approach to integration: immigrants are required to accept and adopt a shared identity that rests on reciprocal obligations and mutual regard—the idea that people have duties to each other, not just to their families but to their fellow citizens as well. Mutual obligations imply solidarity with those in need, who in time will contribute to the entire society. Contribution underpins both a sense of common purpose and mutual recognition. In order to inculcate a shared identity, it is vital to nurture crucibles of social interaction and inclusion where people can associate around shared ends, such as pre-school, sports, music, work, clubs, and faith communities. It is such practical processes of integration that the Danish government has pursued alongside strict limits on immigration.

By trying to re-weave the web of mutual obligations, Frederiksen’s Social Democrats are rebuilding the alliance between the older provincial working class, who are socially conservative, and the younger university-educated metropolitan class who are socially liberal. This cross-class and cross-cultural coalition represents majority views and can hold the line against highly vocal groups that are nonetheless in the minority, those whose militant activism destroys any sense of inherited obligations that bind together different generations and help to integrate immigrants into local and national communities. The domain of reciprocal giving and receiving of help has to be both local and national, for the reason that these levels can raise the tax revenues needed to meet mutual obligations. Thus, Danish Social Democracy leads the way in developing a left conservatism that is postliberal on the economy and on culture.

Similar developments are taking shape in Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, Blue Labour in the U.K. and the Australian Labor Party, but also smaller political parties such as the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. Common to them all is the rejection of identity politics and the embrace of paradoxical combinations: tradition and transformation, patriotism and internationalism, social conservativism on security, immigration and national bonds of belonging mixed with economic radicalism on wages, social protection of workers, and alternatives to finance capitalism. This paradoxical fusion emerges in a rich intellectual tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke, John Ruskin and William Morris to George Orwell, Simone Weil and Christopher Lasch, but also contemporary figures such as Nancy Fraser, Shoshana Zuboff and Jean-Claude Michéa.

As Renaud Large, the editor of a major recent report on the left in Europe, remarks, “post-identitarian politics has the potential to speak beyond the traditional left, because it articulates a universal language: the quest for dignity, collective security, real solidarity, and civic belonging. It could attract voters disillusioned with the right and the far right but also wary of the traditional left. It could rebuild broad, popular, national, and environmental coalitions. It could restore to the left the ambition of being a majority force, after years of internal contradiction and paralysis.” While left conservatism is still a numerically small movement, it has an intellectual energy capable of renewing the left in Europe and beyond.

What’s Wrong with Right-wing Postliberalism

For now, though, Trump and his fellow right-wing populists across the West are ascendant. Yet, their apparent postliberalism is contestable precisely on left-conservative, postliberal grounds. At first glance, the political positions of Trump and his Vice President, J.D. Vance, may appear postliberal insofar as they oppose the neoliberal model of free trade and mass immigration, advocate a national economy protected by tariffs, and defend a more traditional culture that rejects so-called “woke” extremism. The elimination of DEI programs symbolizes the defeat of political and cultural progressivism, the main ideological enemy of Trumpism. The opposition to immigration, the transition to carbon neutrality, and elite universities (for their alleged antisemitism and ideological indoctrination) stems from the same perception that these policies harm the greatness of an America that is no longer respected either domestically or internationally.

However, while the politics of the Trump administration is rather illiberal on a social and cultural level, it remains liberal, even ultra-liberal, on an economic level. With or without Elon Musk, Trump pursues a vision of “neoliberalism in one country” by deploying internal deregulation and abolishing the last bastions of the New Deal, such as worker and consumer protection. The “Big Beautiful Bill” entrenches tax cuts for America’s wealthiest while cutting Medicaid and other support for the poorest. Similarly, right-wing populists of different stripes in Poland, Hungary, and Brazil—when in power—have funded increased state spending with foreign capital, using low tax and deregulatory incentives to draw in foreign investment. Competitive fiscal dumping is part of protectionism, and complements a clampdown on cheap foreign labor. The national-populist alternative to liberal hyper-globalization is market nativism disguised as the promise of economic patriotism. In times of polarization, right-wing populists resort to Leninist tactics of political purges and institution-wrecking. Such a vision combines the pure economic freedom of the individual with increasingly authoritarian political power.

This vision has its diehard ideologues, including the National Conservative movement of Yoram Hazony (former advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu) and the libertarian ideology of populist plutocrats like Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and long-time patron of J.D. Vance), who fuse political populism with the idea that wealth constitutes the ultimate basis of power—an idea shared by Trump. At the heart of this fusion lies the amalgamation of an ethnonationalist atavism and unbridled capitalism, which separately and together undermine the foundations of freedom of expression, association, and conscience. Instead of upholding free speech, it seems that Trump’s variant of national populism, in alliance with Silicon Valley libertarians, undermines substantive democracy and is now counter-cancelling instead of upholding free speech.

If this alliance endures, then right-wing populism will continue to slide into a monstrous authoritarian regression, tainted by a new technological totalitarianism and the cult of the augmented human, as Thiel advocates in his recent interview with Ross Douthat. The U.S. faces a clash between the composite monster of a transhumanist, elitist, and socially reactionary ideology, and a no less worrying transgender, equally elitist and socially ultraliberal ideology.

Right-wing postliberalism is not a constructive alternative to left liberalism. Ethnonationalist and racist ideas are not just incompatible with the notions of equality and dignity, on which the common good and democracy depend. They are also the ultimate expression of the inviolability of will as self-assertion—atavistic assertions of absolute identities. This is the logical conclusion of enthroning the individual as the highest moral entity, an idea that is shared by both contemporary liberalism and Trump’s libertarian nationalism. The nation-state and nationalism are but the individual writ large. Autonomy from constraints and absolute sovereign power over others are the guiding principles of a philosophy that institutes the will-to-power: the power of some over others and essentially the strong over the weak. In a Hobbesian state of nature bequeathed by ultraliberalism, Nietzsche’s nihilistic will-to-power is of a piece with social Darwinism’s “survival of the fittest.”

Left Conservatism as Realism

If it is going to stand any chance of prevailing against right-wing populism, the left needs to abandon liberalism’s double-headed hydra of utopian abstraction and brute materialism in favor of postliberal realism. Being realist is to engage with the world as it is—not as the liberal left would like it to be—and to shape the new political, economic, and cultural realities. Those realities include the shifts from the end of the progressive hegemony to the rise of plutocratic populism, from de-globalization to the emergence of hostile foreign blocs, from “culture wars” to ethnoreligious conflict, including within Western countries such as the U.K., France, Germany, and Sweden.

Realism demands the recognition that those countries face a crisis of state legitimacy, as central governments seem unable to create the conditions for shared prosperity, provide essential public services, uphold law and order, or build proper defense capabilities in the face of hostile foreign powers. Instead, the state is characterized by balkanization and ethnonational extremism, threatening social solidarity and democratic rule. That is why strict limits on immigration and an uncompromising stance on integrating migrants is indispensable. This includes, besides stricter criteria for granting citizenship, support for language training and civic education in exchange for sharing in the common life of society, the alternative to which is ghettoized, self-segregated communities.

The “market-state” that was built in the 1990s and 2000s for the new globalized era subordinates social ties to impersonal values and abstract standards such as global economic exchange or top-down bureaucratic regulation. It has turned out to be utterly dysfunctional since the 2008 financial crisis—hollowing out not just state capacity through draconian cuts but also inflating bureaucracy and further weakening the bonds of social solidarity. Now that the order of global liberalism is unravelling, the state reshaped in its image lives on borrowed time. A realist politics has to start with rebuilding state capacity at the local, regional, and national levels and do so all at once, in association with renewed intermediary institutions like business associations, trade unions, chambers of commerce, craft guilds, and universities. A more strategic state will use new technological possibilities such as AI and big data to reduce the regulatory and bureaucratic burden that delays core activities: housebuilding, transport infrastructure, schools, health and social care, energy and food supply, as well as reindustrialization. Not unlike the post-1945 era, the left has a unique opportunity to rebuild the polity and usher in national renewal.

Realism also demands skepticism. The left needs to question all utopian visions, beginning with ultraliberalism and the vested interests that dominate Western rentier economies. This involves rejecting the binary choice between progressives and populists, which leaves many voters across the West disillusioned and politically homeless. Being realist requires a commitment to national and intellectual renewal by exploring how the left can revitalize the best parts of its own political traditions while also transforming national and civic institutions that have lost their way in the period of unfettered globalization and hyper-individualism—an era that is now coming to an end.

In his prescient book The Coming Anarchy, published in the year 2000, Robert Kaplan warned that the disintegration of society could usher in new forms of tyranny, as people fear anarchic violence more than they fear totalitarian rule. Today, the West faces neither the prospect of a return to ancient despotism nor modern dictatorship. We are, however, confronted with the tech totalitarian control of surveillance capitalism and hybrid warfare waged by hostile foreign powers. To prevail at home and abroad, left realism has to offer constructive alternatives that can transform the rentier economy based on asset-stripping, speculation, and debt into more mutualist markets based on productive activities, investment, and the sharing of equity.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Covid, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the space has opened up for a majority politics based on greater security, national resilience, a balanced economic model, and new coalitions between social classes and cultures. Now that liberal hegemony is over, the question is who will offer such a new politics. Left conservatism has something the populist right lacks—a critique of exploitative capitalism coupled with a commitment to building a more ethical economy. Across Europe, left conservatives are arguing for economic models where more of a country’s wealth goes into the pockets of the workers and where reward and recognition are closely connected with contribution, including unpaid work such as caring for children and the elderly, work which is still mostly performed by women. Such a model involves building a covenant between the elites and the people linked to a social partnership among government, business, and organized labor to negotiate wages and working conditions. It would champion new unions in the gig economy, mutual protectionist arrangements with allies across the West, much-expanded joint defense procurement in Europe, a clampdown on illegal immigration, and a sharp reduction in economic migration.

A new politics has to begin with inherited obligations linked to old traditions and institutions. The duties we owe to ourselves, to others, and to future generations are the basis for a common life in society and a sense of shared endeavor. A new politics has to recognize that duties beget rights, and that we are more fully human when we earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make to the common good through our work and our care for others.

A new politics also has to begin with people as they are in the families, workplaces, communities, and nations. Most people are still broadly “communitarian” in the sense of being somehow small-c conservative in their approach to matters of family, belonging, and social solidarity, and small-s socialist on public services, fair play, and hard work. Most people cherish liberty, but value authority too. Left conservatism speaks to their paradoxical disposition to be more radical on the economy and more moderate on culture. The future of politics lies in the paradoxical fusion of tradition with transformation.

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Adrian Pabst is a professor of political science at the University of Kent. He has published numerous books and essays on the role of ethics and religion in politics.