Is Illiberalism Really Opposed to Neoliberalism? Rethinking Illiberalism as the Ideology of the New Right

Is Illiberalism Really Opposed to Neoliberalism? Rethinking Illiberalism as the Ideology of the New Right

Raphaël Demias-Morisset

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Keywords: illiberalism, neoliberalism, fusionism, new right, conservative revolution

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The success of the concept of illiberal democracy, followed by that of illiberalism, has usefully shown that defining liberalism—and assessing what this ideology has or has not actually done in our contemporary regimes and societies—is far more difficult to grasp than much of the academic literature has long suggested, as evidenced by scholarship highlighting the ambivalent relationship between liberalism and illiberalism.[1] At a time when an unprecedented authoritarian shift can be observed across liberal democracies, driven by the global radicalization of the right and its increasingly overt abandonment of liberal principles, it becomes necessary to ask whether this so-called illiberal moment is the result of the emergence of a new ideology or of a more latent and gradual process.

Unsurprisingly, this question has generated significant controversy within the scholarship on illiberalism and, more broadly, in the academic literature concerned with the question of the crisis of liberal democracy. One can identify a clear divide between, on the one hand, works that conceptualize the illiberal moment as a sui generis phenomenon of calling liberal modernity into question, which transcends the traditional left–right cleavage,[2] and, on the other hand, those that treat this moment as a new episode in the history of the right’s struggle against liberal democracy at both the national and international levels. From the first perspective, illiberalism is understood as stemming from the intrinsic vulnerability of majoritarian democracy to tyranny and populism,[3] and as the conclusion of a cycle in which ideologies had supposedly disappeared owing to the emergence of a liberal consensus. From the second perspective, the illiberal moment is seen as the mutation or adaptation of an intrinsically “reactionary” conservatism[4] that had always been critical of liberal philosophy, and whose adherence to political liberalism had been overestimated[5]—particularly in the United States.[6] Conceptualizations of illiberalism thus diverge sharply depending on how scholars read and reconstruct the narratives and discourses produced by illiberal intellectuals and political actors, in light of their own interpretation of the liberal tradition and of what they understand liberalism to be—that is, in light of their own “grammar” of liberalism.[7]

Depending on how one defines liberalism and the canon of its thinkers, it will appear either as the spirit of Western modernity or, conversely, an ideology whose political implementation has often been contingent and limited.[8] Liberalism can thus be defined in a way that makes it the ideology of the anti-totalitarian consensus constitutive of the American political tradition, as Louis Hartz did, which highlights the liberal character of American conservatism and explains the immunity of the American right to reaction and fascism.[9] One can, however, conversely define liberalism by emphasizing its revolutionary and progressive character, as John Dewey did.[10] Defined in this way, the fate of liberal ideology appears far more unfortunate in the United States than in the United Kingdom, owing to the hegemony of an antiliberal conservatism responsible for the failure to fully implement the New Deal and for the belated abolition of racial segregation.[11]

This article contends that, the narrative that most decisively shapes contemporary understandings of illiberalism—and that is also strategically the most significant for political actors—is the one that conflates liberalism with neoliberalism and posits a rupture between illiberalism and neoliberalism. Within this framework, the literature tends to treat illiberal populism as a coherent and almost inevitable departure from liberal democracy, one that would necessarily combine economic nationalism, state intervention, and a challenge to the rule of law:[12]

The engines of neoliberal, market-led globalization, which appeared un-paralleled in power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seem to have come to a screeching halt. So, too, has the confidence or at least the hope that democracy, in tandem with markets, was on an inevitable course to expand happily ever after. In the West, what is common across otherwise wildly different cases is a distrust for existing parties, deep inequalities coupled with extreme polarization of the political spectrum, and the desire for anti-establishment politicians to clean up corruption and restore responsiveness to their constituencies. On both sides of the Atlantic, opponents of free trade and critics of globalization are organizing; so are ethnic nationalists, who see an opening for more authoritarian politics. More often than not, elections turn into tribunals on the establishment, with the judgment turning against the elites and the status quo.

…

Illiberal tendencies seek to partially reshape neoliberal practices and ideas of the past half-century—the politics of no alternative that posited the inevitability of globalization and the superiority of market solutions—at a moment where these practices and ideas no longer seem legitimate in the core countries of the North Atlantic. While progressives have been criticizing neoliberalism for a long time, it is the right-wing critique of neoliberalism that is much more successfully redoing neoliberalism, and, potentially, undoing liberal democracy in the West and beyond.[13]

As a result, the label “illiberal” is selectively applied. When a party is identified as populist and anti-globalization, the constitutional reforms it implements—and the procedures through which these reforms are enacted—are readily framed as anti-liberal and authoritarian. By contrast, similar institutional transformations or governing practices are frequently interpreted as compatible with liberalism when carried out by actors perceived as market-oriented or “neoliberal.”[14] This asymmetry suggests that assessments of illiberalism are shaped less by the substantive features of the ideas embedded in discourses or political reforms than by a prior association of populism with anti-market politics, which effectively shields pro-market governments from being analyzed through the lens of illiberalism because they are implicitly regarded as anti-populist.[15]

Put differently, the relationship between illiberalism and neoliberalism constitutes both an empirical and conceptual knot—does illiberalism challenge neoliberalism, or does it draw upon it?—and an epistemological and normative one.[16] Illiberalism is frequently defined in relation to what scholars take to be the proper or good form of liberalism, which in turn requires deciding whether neoliberalism falls within the boundaries of liberalism at all. Yet this empirico-conceptual and normative demarcation is further complicated by the fact that scholars do not necessarily refer to the same object when they invoke the term “neoliberalism,” which is often associated with the rejection of state interventionism and of the strong state—a narrative that neoliberals have produced about the free-market that has been extensively contradicted in the academic literature.[17]

In sum, it is crucial to emphasize that delineating the moment at which the process of autocratization began,[18] following the rise to power of a new right at odds with the liberal consensus to which conservatives were supposed to adhere,[19] is anything but self-evident. If, as Zsolt Enyedi invites us to do, one seeks to define illiberalism as the ideology of the demise of liberal democracy,[20] it then appears more judicious to focus on the complex and conflictual relationship between the new radical rights rather than on a left-wing illiberalism.[21] Indeed, the contours of this new right category remain highly unstable. Contemporary ethno-nationalist right-wing movements and intellectuals increasingly claim the label of “new right,”[22] yet the same designation was reclaimed by right-wing forces in the 1970s and 1980s when they asserted the need to counter the passivity of conservatives in the face of the victories won by progressive movements during the 1960s.[23] However, in much of the literature, these earlier formations—combining pro-market orientations with traditionalist values—are typically classified as liberal-conservative rather than illiberal. Furthermore, illiberal ideas cannot be confined to the new right alone, as suggested by the gradual illiberal turn of Emmanuel Macron’s governments in France.[24]

Therefore, this article is structured around the following research problem: to what extent can illiberalism be understood as the outcome of a right-wing transformation that does not simply break with Cold War conservatism and neoliberalism, but may instead emerge through them? If illiberalism designates an ideology that frames the struggle against progressivism, whether liberal or neo-Marxist, as an existential, theological, and civilizational imperative, then its analytical boundaries cannot be confined to contemporary illiberal movements, even though they are the first to call for regime change and the abandonment of liberal democracy in such an explicit and coherent manner. To address this question, the article proceeds in three steps. First, it will bring to light the existence of a Polanyian reading of the illiberal moment within the academic literature. Second, it will critically examine how this Polanyian lens is legitimized by the interpretation of the history of liberalism conveyed by certain illiberal discourses. Finally, it advances a positive argument in favor of extending the scope of illiberalism to encompass the new right of the 1980s, not in spite of its neoliberal orientation, but precisely because of it III.

The Illiberal Moment: Countermovement or Mutation of Neoliberalism? A State of the Field

Illiberalism is commonly understood as a reaction against neoliberalism, interpreted either as a more or less radical form of economic liberalism or as the ideology of globalization and contemporary capitalism. The illiberal phenomenon is therefore often conceived as the product of the dominant ideology of the early twentieth century, particularly its socio-economic effects—rising inequalities, the emergence of a divide between populations resistant to globalization and elites favoring it—and its political consequences, including the crisis of sovereignty and the nation-state.[25] In other words, the origins of illiberalism are frequently analyzed through what can be termed a Polanyian lens,[26] grounded explicitly or implicitly in Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement” in The Great Transformation:

Let us return to what we have called the double movement. It can be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods. The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market—primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes—and using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods.[27]

Applied to the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy, this framework interprets illiberalism as a countermovement to neoliberalism, analogous to the role of fascism in response to liberalism in the 1920s. Consequently, it leads to the association of illiberalism with protectionism or anti-capitalist tendencies, seen as breaking with a classical conservatism that participated in the liberal consensus both economically (free markets) and politically (representative democracy). In fact, although the term “neoliberalism” is not always explicitly used, the literature often draws a causal connection between neoliberalism and the rise of illiberalism, as seen in the foundational conceptualizations of illiberalism advanced by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes,[28] and Marlene Laruelle,[29] and Jasper T. Kauth and Desmond King.[30] Yet the Polanyian framework of the double movement is far from universally accepted in the academic literature,[31] and it is explicitly challenged by researchers who criticize its conservative bias, such as Melinda Cooper:

What makes Polanyi’s theory of the double movement so appealing to a certain kind of left is its tendency to conflate capitalism itself with the logic of the free market and thus to reduce its ideological expression to economic liberalism, understood as a force of social disintegration. Once one has accepted these premises, however, resistance can only be imagined as conservative. If capitalism as an ideological formation is reducible to the tenets of economic liberalism, and if market freedom tends inexorably to disintegrate, disembed, and homogenize social existence, then any viable countermovement must seek to reanchor value as a way of arresting these trends … If capitalism is theorized as uniquely and exclusively destructive of prior social solidarities, then the countermovement can be imagined only as an effort to restore, or at least reinvent, that which was allegedly destroyed by the advent of industrial capitalism.[32]

Cooper’s critique is particularly significant because it anticipates the subsequent appropriation of the double movement thesis by neo-integralist Catholics like Patrick Deneen, who sometimes seek to frame capitalism itself as intrinsically progressive in order to criticize its excesses,[33] even though his critique is in fact closer to a Heideggerian register, opposing a good traditional capitalism to a bad modern capitalism rather than challenging capitalism as such. Drawing on these insights leads to a substantial reconsideration of the relationship between neoliberalism and illiberalism, allowing for an analysis of the continuity between the authoritarian dimension of neoliberal capitalism and the authoritarianism characteristic of the contemporary New Right, whose ideological positioning towards market economy is often deliberately blurry as Wendy Brown notes.[34]

To sum up, the difficulty of delineating the illiberal phenomenon and the new right stems in large part from unresolved disagreements over the relationship between neoliberalism and liberal democracy. In my view, understanding why delineating the illiberal phenomenon requires sustained attention to the relationship between illiberalism, conservatism, and neoliberalism calls for a structured overview of the current state of debates within illiberalism studies. To clarify how different ways of conceptualizing this relationship directly affect the definition and scope of illiberalism, we approach the illiberalism–neoliberalism nexus by distinguishing three main analytical frameworks. Each of these frameworks rests on a specific grammar of liberalism and, as a result, leads to distinct analytical conclusions.

As mentioned earlier, the first and most widespread analytical framework in the literature is that of the double movement. Within this perspective, illiberalism is understood as a reaction against neoliberalism that fundamentally repudiates it. When neoliberalism is conceptualized through a Lockean grammar of liberalism—as the radicalized or extreme form of Cold War liberalism or of the “end of history”[35]—illiberalism is consequently framed as the antithesis of the Washington Consensus. It is thus associated with a rejection of the liberal international order, constitutionalism, free trade, and free-market principles.

The second analytical framework, prominently developed in the works of Wendy Brown, may be described as one of “duplication” or “splitting.” Here, illiberalism is conceptualized as distinct from neoliberalism yet continuous with it. The illiberal phenomenon is understood as a kind of “Frankenstein” product of neoliberalism,[36] in which certain dimensions of neoliberal rationality erode or disappear, while others persist or are even intensified. This framework helps explain both the tensions and the structural coherence between illiberalism and neoliberalism, particularly at a moment when neoliberalism’s economic doctrine has become politically indefensible in societies affected by austerity policies and shock therapy—especially in Central and Eastern Europe.

The third analytical framework, partially consistent with the second and developed in the works of Reijer Hendrikse[37] and Quinn Slobodian[38] as well as by scholars who understand neoliberalism as a neo-Schmittian ideology, is that of “mutation,”[39] or even identity.[40] From this perspective, illiberalism is understood as a mutation or adaptive reconfiguration—more or less opportunistic—of neoliberalism in response to its own socio-political effects and the political crisis they have generated. The appropriation of anti-liberal discourse by political actors ranging from the far right to mainstream conservatism thus signals the emergence of a form of “neo-illiberalism.” This development can be situated within the longer trajectory of the conservative counterrevolution of the 1980s as seen in the elections of American President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and reflects the political and cultural success of the strategy pursued by the New Right since the 1970s.

I argue that the second and third frameworks—the doubling and mutation perspectives—are the most analytically pertinent for understanding the illiberal moment, that is, the explicit abandonment of liberal democracy and the advocacy of “regime change”[41] by a growing fringe of the right, because they make it possible to grasp the anteriority of the process of de-liberalization and de-democratization. In order to justify this conceptualization of illiberalism in a non-prescriptive or normative manner, it is nonetheless necessary to address the two arguments that support it most convincingly: first, the existence of an ideological and organizational conflict, or gap, between the illiberal new right and the conservative and neoliberal establishment; and second, the idea that illiberals have abandoned the legacy of the conservative revolution of the 1970s–1980s by rejecting the free market.

Critically Elucidating the Relationship between Illiberalism and Cold War Conservatism

Indeed, if the illiberal moment is commonly conceived of as the conservative countermovement responding to the excesses of a progressive neoliberalism, this is notably because this genealogy of illiberalism directly echoes the “global right’s”[42] own discourse about its genesis and about the ideological recomposition of the right from the 1990s through the 2010s.[43]

One can thus observe that, despite the diversity of intellectual currents and philosophical traditions invoked by the various factions within the thought collective of the illiberal global right, they all denounce the hegemony of a “totalitarian”[44]  and “imperialist”[45] liberalism over Western societies. The illiberal “thought collective,”[46] together with the literature that treats the illiberal moment as a countermovement, thus subscribes precisely to the interpretation of the history of liberal democracies that underlies the end-of-ideology thesis. According to this thesis, the struggle against fascism and communism legitimized the rise of liberalism in the aftermath of World War II, marking the birth of a non-ideological age, owing to the withering away of ideologies, understood as rigid, systematic doctrines.[47] Yet what characterizes the contemporary global right is that it subscribes to this historiography while reversing its final diagnosis: the advent of this non-ideological age would instead correspond to the furtive domination of a dogmatic liberal ideology—a point that Ryszard Legutko explicates:

In the 1950s, a number of prominent writers, independently of one another, came up with a widely discussed thesis that the age of ideologies was coming to an end. So said the Americans Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Edward Shils and Europeans such as Raymond Aron.

…

In liberal democracy we have been, unfortunately, observing a reverse trend. The ideological smokescreen is becoming more dense and more impenetrable than before. The entire system seems to have embarked on a great transformation. One would be tempted to say that the system created its own liberal-democratic version of the old communist theory that the building of a new society must coincide with the intensification of the campaign against its enemies. That liberal democracy has ambition to create a new society and a new man, and that it is proud of its achievements, is being proclaimed with deafening vehemence. But at the same time one has the impression that the concluding chapter of this magnificent project is always receding into the future. No matter how much work has been done, the enemy is still as strong as ever. How else one could explain the growing officiousness of ideology? There is more and more of it in politics, in law, in education, in the media, in the language.[48]

It is thus precisely this interpretation of the history of liberalism that allows illiberals to call for the questioning of liberal democracy and the dismantling of liberalism in all its forms. For, according to illiberals, conservatives gave up the possibility of countering the “anthropological”[49] influence of liberalism over Western societies, and subsequently over the entire world, by adhering to the liberal consensus of the post-World War II era. Conversely, and symmetrically, most scholars working on illiberalism who subscribe to this historiography normatively defend the need to return to this non-ideological age[50]—a desire that was paradoxically shared by the first Deneen,[51] before he came to embrace the agonistic Schmittian reading of the political[52] that now dominates the illiberal thought collective.

Conceiving of the illiberal moment as the advent of a new right breaking with the neoliberalism that had supposedly dominated Western regimes since the end of World War II appears all the more evident given that the illiberals of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s and American President Donald Trump’s new right have continuously attacked the political and intellectual legacy of cold war conservatism,[53] denouncing its corruption by liberalism and libertarianism—whether in the form of Christian democracy,[54] conservative fusionism, or neoconservatism. This avowed rejection of the conservative establishment has logically generated a conflict within the intellectual and political space of the right, one made particularly visible in the United States by the “never Trump” movement and by the controversy between Sohrab Ahmari and David French.[55] The opposition between the “new” think tanks and intellectual networks of the New Right (such as the Claremont Institute, the Edmund Burke Foundation, and the neo-integralist Catholics) and the “old” think tanks of the Reaganite right (such as the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Acton Institute) has de facto made tangible the idea of a schism between the classical conservatism and libertarianism committed to political and economic liberalism and an illiberal, even fascist, new right.[56]

Yet numerous pieces of evidence invite us to question this rupture between illiberalism and free-market conservatism.[57] First, because although this rupture seems evident in the United States, it is not so in Latin America or in most European countries, since most of the forces of the global right that structure the “reactionary international”[58] still reclaim the fusion between the free market, religious traditionalism, familialism, the strong state, and ethno-nationalism.[59] Second, because numerous figures from anti-Communist Cold War conservatism still play an important role within the illiberal new right,[60] such as John O’Sullivan (President of the Danube Institute and Margaret Thatcher’s former adviser), who describes the ideological orientation of the Danube Institute, one of the keystones of the illiberal ecosystem in Europe, in these terms:

The Danube Institute was founded to introduce Hungary to the wider world, and the wider world to Hungary. We wanted to build understanding between a linguistically unique, historically distinctive nation and an international audience often unfamiliar with its history, culture, and political debates. Over the past decade, that mission has grown far beyond anything we initially imagined. In 2014 we defined ourselves politically as supporting classical liberalism in economics, conservatism in culture and society, and Atlanticism in foreign policy. A few years later we added the defence of democracy and the nation-state to our objectives.[61]

Despite the forceful polemics directed against the free market and libertarianism by some of the most high-profile figures within the illiberal thought collective,[62] one can therefore see that the mainstream combination of conservatism and economic liberalism still plays a key role within the intellectual spaces of the Global New Right. Similarly, one can see that several of the most important think tanks of the formerly Reaganite right, such as the Heritage Foundation, are today cornerstones of the intellectual and political space of the MAGA new right, which explains the conflicts between the different factions of the illiberal right’s thought collective over control of these strategic spaces. This observation invites a critical questioning of the idea of a historic ideological and organizational schism between the Trumpist New Right and the old neoliberal and neoconservative right-wing establishment. Far from appearing as a rupture, one can indeed conceive of the new right’s contemporary advocacy of “regime change” as the logical continuation of the critique of liberal democracy, of Eisenhower’s “betrayal,” and of the reforms initiated in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, as formulated within the conservative fusionism of the 1950s and 1960s.[63] Likewise, adherence to “red Caesarism”[64] and to the supremacist and neo-fascist theses of the alt-right appears as the logical sequel to the eugenicist theses defended by the neoliberals and libertarians of the 1980s and 1990s, who supported apartheid and authoritarian military regimes in Latin America.[65]

Notwithstanding the very real conflicts within the intellectual and political space of the American right, which lend circumstantial support to the thesis of a rupture between the right committed to free-market conservatism and the illiberal right,[66] it seems necessary to adopt a critical distance from the discourse of some illiberal intellectuals and political actors regarding the genealogy of their own ideology. In order to construct this counter-genealogy of illiberalism, however, one must interrogate the blind spots of illiberalism studies, and more broadly of the academic literature, regarding the persistence of authoritarian and freedom-restricting practices within Western liberal democracies, by underscoring the gap that separates “really existing liberalism” from liberal ideology itself.[67] Similarly, to emphasize the often-overlooked links between fascism and neoliberalism,[68] or the anteriority of illiberal ideas within the intellectual space of Cold War fusionism particularly in the pages of the National Review,[69] in keeping with the work of historians such as Steven Hahn, Quinn Slobodian, and David A. Walsh, who have shown, in an extremely convincing manner, the already “antiliberal” and authoritarian character of the American right.[70]

From this perspective, I believe it is possible to offer a constructive critique of the genealogy of the Trumpist new right proposed by Laura K. Field in Furious Minds, who distinguishes it from, and opposes it to, Reaganism. Indeed, while the latter brilliantly analyzes the content and particularities of the critiques of liberalism voiced by each faction within the intellectual pole of the new right, simultaneously highlighting both their effectiveness and their bad faith, it seems necessary to me to extend this observation to the discourse of American MAGA intellectuals regarding the genealogy of their own movement, by underscoring its ambivalence and its unreliability. In order to shed light on the ambiguities of illiberal discourse regarding neoliberalism and Cold War conservatism, it is worth emphasizing, in my view, the ambivalence displayed by several of the most important MAGA intellectuals toward the legacy of Reaganism—absent the possibility of conducting an exhaustive comparison of these discourses across the entire intellectual space of the illiberal thought collective.

Which Liberalism Is Targeted by the Leading Intellectuals of the Illiberal Thought Collective?

First, and although this issue is largely overlooked and its importance often underestimated, one can note that the majority of intellectuals conventionally considered theorists of illiberalism do not adopt the label themselves; in fact, they explicitly reject it, as exemplified by Yoram Hazony and Ryszard Legutko.[71] The term “illiberalism” is more commonly used in contemporary illiberal circles to critique and denounce what they see as the identitarianism of the new left, or to applaud the overturning of Roe v. Wade[72]—positions consistent with Frank Furedi’s critique of what he perceives as the “illiberal methods” of anti-populist liberals.[73]

Indeed, Deneen, Hazony, and Legutko share a thorough philosophical critique of the individualism and contractualism of classical liberalism, which leads them to denounce the reduction of conservatism to a defense of Locke against the progressive liberalism of John S. Mill and John Dewey.[74] Yet significant variations exist in their critiques of the hegemony of this Lockean paradigm, particularly regarding its perceived incompatibility or intolerance toward nationalism and religious faith. Their differing interpretations of liberal historiography result in divergent uses of the term “Lockean,” reflecting varying degrees of conciliation with the liberal-conservative tradition. Across their writings, these thinkers trace a critical genealogy of Lockean liberalism—positively defined by individualism and property rights, negatively by anticlericalism and antinationalism—with intellectual ancestors ranging from Rousseau, Kant, and John Rawls to Ayn Rand, Mises, and Hayek. At the same time, all three express nostalgia for an anthropologically and culturally conservative liberalism (premodern or Victorian) which could exist only thanks to the safeguards provided by religion and national sentiment, as Hazony emphasizes.[75]

In common with many conservatives, they stress the dangers posed by the transition from “classical” to “progressive” liberalism.[76] Their critiques converge in denouncing this transformation, which Deneen articulates most clearly:

Liberalism’s second wave—Progressivism—argued that the rampant inequality that first-wave liberalism so successfully advanced was, in fact, an obstacle to the realization of true selfhood. Later liberals agreed that the first wave of liberalism had successfully undermined the old aristocratic political and economic forms, but concluded that its very successes had generated new pathologies that needed a reinvented liberalism. Liberalism today is widely identified as the opposite of early-modern liberalism’s encouragement of economic liberty and hence stratification, instead stressing the imperative for greater economic equality. But this embrace of economic equality was not intended to secure an opposite outcome to classical liberalism: rather, it sought to extend the weakening of social forms and cultural traditions already advanced by classical liberalism, with an end to increasing political consolidation. Under classical liberalism, this end could best be achieved by limiting government’s authority over individuals. For progressive liberalism, it was best achieved by empowering the State to equalize the fruits of an increasingly prosperous society while intervening more actively in the realms of church, family, and even human sexuality.[77]

While Legutko differs somewhat from Deneen and Hazony in associating liberalism more closely with socialist totalitarianism (whereas the others are more moderate toward the Founding Fathers’ liberalism) it is clear that their conceptualization of liberalism is teleologically guided by their critique of contemporary progressivism and their visceral rejection of feminism, gender studies, and antiracist activism. From this perspective, their writings do not present theoretical innovations relative to the fusionist conservative critique of liberalism developed within the American right after World War II, but they do offer a novel critique of the failure of classical conservatism in its struggle against progressivism. Indeed, they reproduce the core elements of the original New Right critique against the liberalism of the New Deal and the ERA amendment:[78]

• Opposition to welfarism and state socio-economic intervention, framed as authoritarian intrusions into the private sphere under the guise of defending the patriarchy and the traditional family;
• Criticism of multiculturalism and the perceived failure of liberal democracy, exemplified by the rise of the New Left from the 1960s onward;
• Opposition to antinationalism and globalism, particularly free movement of people, framed in xenophobic and racist terms;
• Rejection of human rights, especially second- and third-generation rights, due to their progressive and socialist dimensions, highlighting a persistent narrative of alleged socialist infiltration within contemporary liberalism.[79]

However, the recycling of this conservative critique does not preclude significant strategic divergences in how these thinkers define liberalism. Hazony emphasizes the importance of defending the Reagan-Thatcher conservative revolution, a position not shared by Deneen or Vermeule, yet aligns with them in rejecting any return to the “liberal consensus” of Cold War conservatism.[80] Legutko, meanwhile, focuses more on the mainstream liberalism of the European Union, and he has historically been relatively balanced in his views on the conservatism of neoliberal figures like Friedrich von Hayek.[81] Notably, none of the three theorists develop critiques of the rule of law or theorize an overtly illiberal political regime equivalent to Peter Simpson[82] or Adrian Vermeule.[83] While Deneen favors abandoning the US Constitution in favor of a postliberal “aristopopulism,”[84] whose contours remain unclear—Hazony is more ambiguous on this point, since he advocates a return to the Anglo-American common law constitutional tradition and rejects the “rationalist” constitutionalism of the Enlightenment,[85] but does not openly call for abandoning the US Constitution—both nonetheless join Legutko in denouncing above all the subversion of the rule of law by progressive ideology during the nineteenth century up to the present day. Similarly, their critique of liberal constitutionalism is justified by the obsolescence of the nation-state and the increasing incorporation of international or supranational law into domestic law, driven by the interplay of individualism, progressivism, and statism.

In conclusion, despite their critiques of Lockean classical liberalism, Deneen, Hazony, and Legutko (like the majority of intellectuals within the “illiberal thought collective”)[86] share a fundamentally progressive liberal grammar: their illiberalism is the antithesis of leftist liberalism and not neoliberalism nor conservative-liberalism. Their writings continue the conservative critique of liberalism formulated in political arenas where liberalism was conventionally considered progressive—the most developed expression of which was the American right. In this regard, their critiques introduce a strikingly forceful analysis of the failure of classical conservatism to resist progressivism, which leads them to break with the earlier New Right’s principled commitment to liberal constitutionalism and originalism in the United States. Therefore, rejecting the liberal consensus of the Cold War, and at times the rule of law itself, is framed as necessary to combat a liberalism inherently aligned with progressive values threatening family, religion, and the nation. However, these illiberal intellectuals share a common understanding of the liberalism they oppose but differ in their diagnoses of its crisis, their strategies for disengagement from liberal norms, and their stance toward institutional conservatism, as illustrated by the 2022 National Conservative Conference manifesto: Legutko and Hazony signed it,[87] supporting the rule of law and free-market principles, whereas Vermeule and Deneen emphasize the need to deepen the rupture initiated by Trumpism against any temptation to revive Reaganism.[88] Consequently, it is necessary to interrogate the illiberal dimension of Reaganism and of the original New Right.

Moving Past Illiberalism’s Misleading Free-Market Critique: Rethinking the Conservative Revolution of the 1970s and 1980s as the First Illiberal Moment

To justify the inclusion of the 1970s and 1980s conservative revolution within the scope of illiberalism, and thus the continuity between the original New Right and the contemporary one, it is necessary to critically examine the central argument of the double movement thesis, which posits a rupture between the new illiberal right and conservatism. As I have shown, this idea is deeply embedded in both populism and illiberalism studies. In its simplest form, it asserts that the new populist illiberal right is politically opposed to economic and political liberalism together due to its protectionism and ethno-nationalism.

The bias induced by this narrative is particularly evident in the comparative treatment of the Republican Party under the leadership of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Indeed, Reagan (and before him, the intellectual circles of the American conservative right)[89] repeatedly positioned himself against the American establishment, both economic and political.[90] It is undeniable that market critique can occupy a significant place in illiberal discourse, though it is secondary to immigration, gender and sexuality issues. Sociologically, the salience of the free-market issue among illiberal parties is clear: it is strategically relevant both electorally and politically, whether in Central and Eastern Europe,[91] where the export of “market democracy” had deleterious socio-economic effects, or in the United States, where it helps justify the perceived rupture between the MAGA New Right and pro-market conservatism:

An intellectual and political movement—sometimes called the New Right, although it shares many commitments with and draws inspiration from the Old Left—has upended American conservatism in recent years … Opposed to the New Right is the old Reaganite “conservatism”—in truth, the right wing of liberalism. The old right continues to push the agenda of free speech, free markets, and the free use of drones.[92]

This discursive rupture concerning the free market, widely noted and lamented among the highly conservative libertarians of the Mises Institute,[93] can nonetheless be largely dismissed if attention is shifted from illiberal discourse to the policies implemented by ethno-nationalist right-wing parties globally, which remain strongly pro-market and committed to austerity measures and supply-side economics as noted by Hendrikse,[94] fully consistent with the conservative revolution of the 1980s. Consequently, any analysis of illiberalism must take seriously the internal contradictions of illiberal discourse on the free market. While illiberal actors frequently adopt a critical rhetoric toward neoliberalism, their concrete policy choices largely preserve orthodox neoliberal arrangements, particularly with regard to the promotion of family-based welfare and private “family bonds,” sustained attacks on trade unions, and the systematic dismantling of labor protections.[95] These empirical continuities call into question the narrative of a genuine rupture with neoliberal capitalism and significantly weaken the explanatory power of the double movement thesis.

Therefore, to understand the origins of contemporary illiberalism, it is useful to recall that as early as the 1960s in the United States, a critique of liberalism had emerged combining opposition to the New Deal (economic liberalism), rejection of gender and racial equality (social liberalism), and the repudiation of individual rights (political liberalism)—except insofar as they were deemed necessary for the functioning of the traditional family and patriarchal capitalism.[96] This critique became particularly significant as it radicalized in response to the egalitarian demands of civil rights movements. Because of the inherently reactive nature of conservatism,[97] illiberalism as we know it today emerged precisely when minorities began asserting the practical enforcement of universal rights theoretically guaranteed by liberal constitutions and declarations. In other words, as individual autonomy and legal equality were progressively realized through the Civil Rights Movement and feminist campaigns such as the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a growing segment of conservatism concluded that liberalism must be opposed on multiple fronts. A focus on illiberal discourse obscures the coherence of pro-market policies implemented by illiberal right-wing parties globally, which maintain austerity measures and neoliberal economic policies.

It is thus the permeability of liberalism to progressive egalitarian demands—particularly those of sexual minorities—that prompted part of the conservative movement to conclude that liberalism and conservatism could no longer coexist. Notably, the illiberal self-identification with the New Right stems precisely from the 1960s, when the term was first adopted by a conservative movement increasingly attentive to the democratization and sexual liberalization of society. While contemporary illiberalism often leverages populist opposition to neoliberal policies and their socio-economic effects, which have intensified across successive economic crises, this does not imply any fundamental rejection of free-market capitalism or globalization. Indeed, the Polanyian reading of illiberalism overlooks the fact that the majority of far-right parties continue to explicitly claim a libertarian and neoliberal legacy in their opposition to the welfare state—depicted as protecting immigrants, women, and sexual minorities—as illustrated in Europe by the AfD, the FPÖ, Vox, and the Lega, and beyond Europe by political figures such as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Argentinean President Javier Milei, and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. In doing so, these actors situate themselves in clear continuity with the conservative revolution led among others by Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, contemporary illiberalism is often framed as contesting the neoliberal consensus established since the late 1970s, whereas ethno-nationalist populism has historically defended deregulated capitalism—a dynamic exemplified by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France during the 1980s.[98] Le Pen pioneered a discourse combining free-market advocacy, moral conservatism, and xenophobia, effectively importing New Right ideological patterns into France.

This demonstrates that the illiberals’ critique of capitalism and the free market is both incoherent and misleading, because those factions that critique the market are the same ones that support the deregulation of capitalism and the alliance with Big Tech companies. For example, American Vice President J. D. Vance, who criticizes libertarianism and champions “middle America,” is one of the leading advocates for AI deregulation and digital capitalism.[99] Similarly, behind the populist critiques of Silicon Valley voiced by certain isolated figures on the MAGA right, one can increasingly observe the depth of the alliance between the Tech Right and the 2nd Trump Administration—an alliance that is legitimized and supported by the full range of currents within the illiberal thought collective in the United States.[100] From this perspective, we can see that the defense of capitalism and its deregulation is not an anomaly or the product of a contradiction between theory and practice within the new right, but rather the expression of a genuine ideological coherence, one not always acknowledged by illiberal intellectuals critical of libertarianism—which does not stop them from supporting DOGE.[101]

Conclusion

This article defends the idea that the interpretation of the historical relationship between liberal democracy, neoliberalism, and conservatism determines how the contemporary illiberal moment is understood: if one emphasizes the hegemonic character of liberal ideology in the democracies of the Global North since the end of World War II—which entails conflating liberalism with neoliberalism—one will turn illiberalism into a new ideology imported into the West from Russia by a Hungarian, and later Trumpist, Trojan horse. Conversely, if one considers the anteriority of the critiques and effective challenges to liberalism within conservative intellectual and political spaces, one will note the continuity between the illiberal New Right of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Javier Milei, and the first neoliberal New Right of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Augusto Pinochet.

In my view, far from constituting a rupture with neoliberalism, the illiberal moment (that is, the avowed abandonment of liberal democracy) should instead be understood as an adaptation and a radicalization of conservatism in response to the failure of the prior conservative counter-revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. From this perspective, I contend that illiberalism is best conceptualized as the ideology of the New Right—whether in its original form, emerging in the aftermath of the Second World War, or in its contemporary manifestations. Such a conceptualization of illiberalism nonetheless requires demonstrating the flaws of the Polanyian approach to illiberalism, by showing that it stems partly from a misleading narrative about the history of liberalism and conservatism, and then underscoring the continuity between the conservative revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and the more recent conservative revolution that characterizes the contemporary illiberal moment.

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[1] See, for example, Desmond King, In The Name of Liberalism: Illiberal Social Policy in the USA and Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Mark Tushnet, “The Possibility of Illiberal Constitutionalism?,” Florida Law Review 69, no. 6 (2019), p. 1367; Michael McCann and Filiz Kahraman, “On the Interdependence of Liberal and Illiberal/Authoritarian Legal Forms in Racial Capitalist Regimes … The Case of the United States,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 17.1 (2021), pp. 483–503, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-111720-012237; Marlene Laruelle, ‘Introduction: Illiberalism Studies as a Field’, in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. by Marlene Laruelle (Oxford University Press, 2024), p. 0, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.49.

[2] In schematic terms, these are the papers that situate illiberalism within the continuity of Fareed Zakaria’s seminal article and book, which did not invent illiberalism or illiberal democracy, For a non-exhaustive list of examples, see in particular: Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (November/December 1997): 22–43; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003); Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, eds., Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (London: Routledge, 2021), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367260569; Takis S. Pappas, Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[3] On this topic, see Hugo Canihac, “Illiberal, Anti-Liberal or Post-Liberal Democracy? Conceptualizing the Relationship between Populism and Political Liberalism,” Political Research Exchange 4, no. 1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2022.2125327.

[4] Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

[5] Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[6] Steven Hahn, Illiberal America: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024).

[7] Raphaël Demias-Morisset, “The Paradoxical Sources of Illiberalism: A Synoptic Approach to the Genealogies of Illiberalism,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 4, no. 2 (Summer 2024): p. 1–19, https://doi.org/10.53483/XCPS3572.

[8] Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Collapse of Liberalism,” Socialist Register, 28 (1992); Immanuel Wallerstein, “The End of What Modernity?” Theory and Society (1995): 471–488.

[9] Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955).

[10] John Dewey, “The Future of Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 32, no. 9 (1935): 225–230, https://doi.org/10.2307/2015856.

[11] Leo P. Ribuffo, “Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything about It?” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (1994), pp. 438–449, https://doi.org/10.2307/2167283; Margaret Weir, “States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism,” Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 2 (2005): 157–172, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X05000106; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).

[12] For example, see Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: A Reckoning (London: Penguin, 2019); Ruzha Smilova, “The Ideational Core of Democratic Illiberalism,” in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, eds. András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes (London: Routledge, 2021): p. 177–202.

[13] Boris Vormann and Michael D. Weinman, eds., The Emergence of Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phenomenon (London: Routledge, 2020).

[14] Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (London: Verso Books, 2020); Aurelien Mondon, “Really Existing Liberalism, the Bulwark Fantasy, and the Enabling of Reactionary, Far Right Politics,” Constellations 32, no. 1 (2025): 47–58, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12749.

[15] This bias is all the more paradoxical given that free-market doctrine and neoliberalism have misleadingly appropriated the label of liberalism, as noted by both Michael Freeden et Helena Rosenblatt, among others. See Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691184135; Michael Freeden, “European Liberalisms: An Essay in Comparative Political Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 9–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885107083401.

[16] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

[17] Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, with a New Preface (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019); Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, ed. by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski (London: Verso, 2020).

[18] Andrea Cassani and Luca Tomini, “Reversing Regimes and Concepts: From Democratization to Autocratization,” European Political Science 19, no. 2 (2020): 272–287, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-018-0168-5.

[19] John Maria Skorupski, “The Conservative Critique of Liberalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism, ed. Stephen Wall, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 401–422, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139942478.022.

[20] Zsolt Enyedi, “Concept and Varieties of Illiberalism,” Politics and Governance 12, no. 0 (2024).

[21] Emmy Eklundh, “Is There a Left-Wing Illiberalism?” The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024): 291–304; Tarik Kochi, “Authoritarian Populism, Democracy and the Long Counter-Revolution of the Radical Right,” Contemporary Political Theory 22, no. 4 (2023): 439–459, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-022-00611-3.

[22] Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).

[23] Michael Minkenberg, “The Renewal of the Radical Right: Between Modernity and Anti-Modernity,” Government and Opposition, 35.2 (2000), pp. 170–88, https://doi.org/10.1111/1477-7053.00022.

[24] Éric Fassin, State Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Gender and Race: Illiberal France and Beyond (Central European University Press, 2024); Aurelien Mondon, “Hegemonic Defeatism: The Mainstreaming of Far-Right Politics in France,” Parliamentary Affairs 78, no. 4 (2025), p. 675–694, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsae044.

[25] Matthew Sparke, “Comparing and Connecting Territories of Illiberal Politics and Neoliberal Governance,” Territory, Politics, Governance 8, no. 1 (2020): 95–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2019.1674182.

[26] Sławomir Czech and Maciej Kassner, “Understanding the Rise of Illiberal Populism in Central and Eastern Europe: Insights from Scholarship Influenced by Karl Polanyi,” Forum for Social Economics 52, no. 3 (2023): 223–239, https://doi.org/10.1080/07360932.2023.2218584; Tuğberk Samur, “Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Critique of Liberalism and the Emergence of Illiberalism,” The George Washington University, Illiberalism Studies Program (2024), https://www.illiberalism.org/karl-polanyis-the-great-transformation-the-critique-of-liberalism-and-the-emergence-of-illiberalism/.

[27] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Incorporated, 1944), p. 138.

[28] András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, eds., Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (London: Routledge, 2021), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367260569.

[29] Marlene Laruelle, “Illiberalism: A Conceptual Introduction,” East European Politics 38, no. 2 (June 2022): 303–327, https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2022.2037079; Marlene Laruelle, “Introduction: Illiberalism Studies as a Field,” in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), p. 1–40, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.49.

[30] Jasper Theodor Kauth and Desmond King, “Illiberalism,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 61, no. 3 (2020): 365–405, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975620000181.

[31] Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London: Verso Books, 2019); Ian Bruff, “Overcoming the Allure of Neoliberalism’s Market Myth,” South Atlantic Quarterly 118, no. 2 (2019): 363–379, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-7381194; Arun Kundnani, “The Racial Constitution of Neoliberalism,” Race & Class 63, no. 1 (2021): 51–69, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396821992706; Priya Chacko, “The Neoliberal Roots of Authoritarian Protectionism,” International Politics 60, no. 2 (2023): 449–460, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00445-9.

[32] Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017).

[33] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

[34] Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, p. 12–20.

[35] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

[36] Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century ‘Democracies,’ ” Critical Times 1, no. 1 (2018): 60–79.

[37] Reijer Hendrikse, “Neo-Illiberalism,” Geoforum 95 (2018): 169–172, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.07.002; Reijer Hendrikse, “The Rise of Neo-Illiberalism,” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 41, no. 1 (2021): 65–93, art. 1, https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.40.2.37158.

[38] Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).

[39] William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, “Introduction: Theorizing Mutant Neoliberalism,” in Mutant Neoliberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), p. 1–38.

[40] Renato Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism: Strong State, Free Economy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998); William E. Scheuerman, “The Rule of Law at Century’s End,” Political Theory 25, no. 5 (1997): 740–760, https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591797025005007; Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1994); Callison and Manfredi, Mutant Neoliberalism.

[41] For examples of explicit advocacy for “regime change” within the various factions of the illiberal thought collective, see Yoram Hazony, “Conservative Democracy,” First Things, January 1, 2019; Stephen M. Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022); Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (New York: Sentinel, 2023).

[42] Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, “Radical Conservatism and Global Order: International Theory and the New Right,” International Theory 10, no. 3 (2018): 285–313, https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297191800012X.

[43] Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, “America First: Paleoconservatism and the Ideological Struggle for the American Right,” Journal of Political Ideologies 25, no. 1 (2020): 28–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2020.1699717; Field, Furious Minds; Valentin Behr and Eve Gianoncelli, “The Radicalization of ‘Intellectual Conservatism’ in the Illiberal Moment: The Case of The European Conservative,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 5, no. 3 (2025): 59–74, https://doi.org/10.53483/zcrw3612.

[44] On this point, see in particular pages 31–32 on the epub edition of Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (New York: Encounter Books, 2018).
See  also Adrian Vermeule, “Why I Lost Interest in the Liberalism Debate,” The New Digest (blog), Substack, February 3, 2024, accessed August 7, 2025, https://thenewdigest.substack.com/p/why-i-lost-interest-in-the-liberalism.

[45] Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (London: Hachette UK, 2018) p. 14-15.

[46] On the concept of “thought-collective,” see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, with a New Preface (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); Aron Buzogány and Mihai Varga, ‘Illiberal Thought Collectives and Policy Networks in Hungary and Poland,’ European Politics and Society 24, no. 1 (2023): 40–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/23745118.2021.1956238.

[47] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, with “The Resumption of History in the New Century” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

[48] Legutko, The Demon in Democracy.

[49] Ryszard Legutko, “Why I Am Not a Liberal,” First Things, March 1, 2020, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/why-i-am-not-a-liberal.

[50] Krastev and Holmes, The Light That Failed.

[51] Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed; Adrian Vermeule, “Integration from within,” American Affairs Journal, February 20, 2018.

[52] On the influence of Carl Schmitt’s political theory, which frames politics fundamentally as a struggle structured by the friend-enemy distinction, emphasizing conflict, antagonism, and the constitutive role of adversarial relations over consensus-based or liberal-deliberative models of political life; and on the political thought of key intellectuals of the New Right, see: Field, Furious Minds.

[53] See, for example, Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018); Legutko, “Why I Am Not a Liberal”; Various, “Against the Dead Consensus,” First Things, March 21, 2019, https://firstthings.com/against-the-dead-consensus; Simon P. Kennedy, “True Conservatism and the Future of the Right,” Quadrant, July 27, 2022, https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/uncategorized/true-conservatism-and-the-future-of-the-right/.

[54] Szilárd Szendrei, “The Failure of Christian Democracy,” The European Conservative, September 27, 2021.

[55] Sohrab Ahmari, “Against David French-ism,” First Things, May 29, 2019; David French, “What Ahmari Gets Wrong,” National Review, May 30, 2019 .

[56] Field, Furious Minds.

[57] Edward Nell, Free Market Conservatism: A Critique of Theory & Practice, Routledge Revivals (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

[58] Nicholas Michelsen, Pablo de Orellana, and Filippo Costa Buranelli, “The Reactionary Internationale: The Rise of the New Right and the Reconstruction of International Society,” International Relations 39, no. 1 (2025): 3–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231186392; Darío Varela Fernández, “Foro Madrid y sus encuentros regionales: El arma de Vox para crear una sólida entente internacional reaccionaria,” Amnis: Revue d’études des sociétés et cultures contemporaines Europe/Amérique, no. 24 (October 2025), https://doi.org/10.4000/14y0o.

[59] Pierre Dardot, “Néolibéralisme ‘classique’ et nouveau néolibéralisme,” Sens public, 2020, p. 1–23, https://doi.org/10.7202/1079475ar; Hendrikse, “The Rise of Neo-Illiberalism.”

[60] Behr and Gianoncelli, “The Radicalization of ‘Intellectual Conservatism’ in the Illiberal Moment.”

[61] John O’Sullivan, “A Message from John O’Sullivan, President of the Danube Institute,” Danube Institute website, statements, June 18, 2026, https://danubeinstitute.hu/hu/kozlemenyek/a-message-from-john-o-sullivan-president-of-the-danube-institute.

[62] See, for example, J. D. Vance, “Beyond Libertarianism,’ First Things, July 26, 2019; Adrian Vermeule, “Against Right Liberalism,” Compact, March 22, 2022, https://www.compactmag.com/article/against-right-liberalism/.

[63] Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (1994): 409–429, https://doi.org/10.2307/2167281; David Austin Walsh, Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024); Joshua Tait, “American Illiberal Thinkers,” in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), p. 913–936, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.33.

[64] Field, Furious Minds.

[65] Quinn Slobodian, “Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right,” Cultural Politics 15, no. 3 (2019): 372–386, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-7725521; Quinn Slobodian, “Quinn Slobodian on New Fusionism, Libertarian Eugenics, and Far-Right Capitalism,” Agora (blog), December 29, 2025, The George Washington University, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, https://www.illiberalism.org/quinn-slobodian-on-new-fusionism-libertarian-eugenics-and-far-right-capitalism/.

[66] See, for example,  James M. Patterson, and Thomas D. Howes, Why Postliberalism Failed (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Acton Institute, 2026).

[67] Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right,” Feminist Studies 7, no. 2 (1981): 206–246, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177522; Mondon, “Really Existing Liberalism, the Bulwark Fantasy, and the Enabling of Reactionary, Far Right Politics.”

[68] Blake Stewart and Thibault Biscahie, “Neoliberalism and Fascism in the Short Twentieth Century: Collective Intellectuals, Anti-Communism and the Rise of Neoconservatism,” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 27, no. 1 (2026): 118–135, https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2025.2609567; Lloyd Cox and Brendon O’Connor, “Trumpism, Fascism and Neoliberalism,” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 27, no. 1 (2026): 29–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2025.2481159.

[69] Savannah Eccles Johnston, “The Rise of Illiberal Conservatism: Immigration and Nationhood at National Review,” American Political Thought 10, no. 2 (2021): 190–216, https://doi.org/10.1086/713668.

[70] Walsh, Taking America Back; Hahn, Illiberal America; Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards.

[71] Yoram Hazony, “There’s No Such Thing as an ‘Illiberal,’ ” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-no-such-thing-as-an-illiberal-1501874893; Ryszard Legutko, “Why I Am Not a Liberal,” First Things, March 1, 2020, https://firstthings.com/why-i-am-not-a-liberal/.

[72] “Rolling Back Woke Higher Ed,” National Review (blog), December 1, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/19/rolling-back-woke-higher-ed/; “The Year of Illiberal Liberalism,” National Review (blog), January 31, 2024, https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/the-year-of-illiberal-liberalism/; Charles Kesler, Mark Lilla, Heather Mac Donald, and Ryan Williams, “The Tyranny of Identity Politics,” Claremont Institute, panel discussion, Harvard Club, Cambridge Room, New York, November 9, 2017, https://beta.claremont.org/events/tyrannyidentitypolitics/.

[73] Frank Furedi, “The Psychological Construction of the Illiberal Subject,” in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, eds. András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 650.

[74] “The modern American landscape is occupied by two parties locked in permanent battle. One, deemed ‘conservative,’ advances the project of individual liberty and equality of opportunity especially through defense of a free and unfettered market; the other, deemed liberal, aims at securing greater economic and social equality through extensive reliance upon the regulatory and judicial powers of the national government. Our dominant political narrative pits defenders of individual liberty—articulated by such authors of the liberal tradition as John Locke and the American Founding Fathers— against the statism of ‘progressive’ liberals inspired by figures like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey. The two worldviews are regarded as irreconcilable opposites.” Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, p. 50.

[75] “As long as liberal political theories were being promoted in a context still under the sway of strong Calvinist or Anglican Old Testament traditions, the inability of these liberal theories to provide any sense of the nation as a bounded community was of little consequence. Statesmen and philosophers raised on the Bible just assumed that their own nation was, like ancient Israel, a bounded entity that sought freedom and independence from other nations. But as liberalism has detached itself from its biblical and Protestant origins, its nonnationalist character has become ever more pronounced. Since all men are equally in need of having their lives and property protected, a politics based on liberalism alone—without any supplement from biblical tradition—means that the persistence of independent national states will be, at best, a matter of indifference.” Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (London: Hachette UK, 2018), p. 32.

[76] “The development of liberal democracy confirmed Tocqueville’s diagnosis. Because egalitarianism weakens communities and thus deprives men of an identity-giving habitat, it creates a vacuum around them. Hence a desire exists for a new identity, this time modern and in line with the spirit of militant egalitarianism.” Legutko, The Demon in Democracy, p. 141.

[77] Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, p. 126–127.

[78] For an overview of these critiques, see Petchesky, “Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right”; Drolet and Williams, “Radical Conservatism and Global Order”; Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael Williams, “The View from MARS: US Paleoconservatism and Ideological Challenges to the Liberal World Order,” International Journal 74, no. 1 (2019): 15–31, https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702019834716.

[79] Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère, Human Rights on Trial: A Genealogy of the Critique of Human Rights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For examples of critiques of the infiltration of socialism into democratic regimes through human rights, see in particular Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2, Economics Books series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), https://econpapers.repec.org/bookchap/ucpbkecon/9780226320830.htm; Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (London: Springer, 2001).

[80] Yoram Hazony, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022).

[81] Ryszard Legutko, “Was Hayek an Instrumentalist?” Critical Review 11, no. 1 (1997): 145–164, https://doi.org/10.1080/08913819708443448. It should be noted that while Hayek himself rejected the label of “conservative” in his famous postscript to The Constitution of Liberty,titled, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,”and throughout his life opposed the “progressive” appropriation of liberalism by claiming descent from the British Old Whig tradition, certain specialists in the history of liberal ideas, such as Michael Freeden, reject the thesis that he belongs to the liberal “family,” and more recent scholarship shows the extent to which his defense of authoritarianism and apartheid in Global South regimes brings him close to the far right. See Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory; Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards.

[82] Peter L. P. Simpson, Political Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315126661.

[83] Vermeule, “Integration from within”; Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2022).

[84] Deneen, Regime Change, p. 160.

[85] Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism, p. 36; Hazony, Conservatism, p. 16.

[86] Aron Buzogány and Mihai Varga, “Illiberal Thought Collectives and Policy Networks in Hungary and Poland,” European Politics and Society 24, no. 1 (2023): 40–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/23745118.2021.1956238.

[87] National Conservatism (organization), “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles,” National Conservatism website, n.d. https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/.

[88] Various, “Against the Dead Consensus.”

[89] For example, one can point to William F. Buckley Jr.’s attacks on the hegemony of liberalism in American universities in the aftermath of World War II, as well as his denunciation of “false conservatives,” whom he accused of having betrayed conservatism by embracing the New Deal and the United Nations: William F. Buckley Jr., “Our Mission Statement,” National Review, November 19, 1955, https://www.nationalreview.com/1955/11/our-mission-statement-william-f-buckley-jr/.

[90] Robert C. Smith, “Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and the Future of the Republican Party and Conservatism in America,” American Political Thought 10, no. 2 (2021): 283–289, https://doi.org/10.1086/713662.

[91] Ivan Szelenyi and Tamás Csillag, “Drifting from Liberal Democracy: Neo-Conservative Ideology of Managed Illiberal Democratic Capitalism in Post-Communist Europe,” Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics 1, no. 1 (2015), art. 1, https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v1i1.28; Matthew Sparke, “Comparing and Connecting Territories of Illiberal Politics and Neoliberal Governance,” Territory, Politics, Governance 8, no. 1 (2020): 95–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2019.1674182; Seongcheol Kim, “Between Illiberalism and Hyper-Neoliberalism: Competing Populist Discourses in the Czech Republic,” European Politics and Society 21 no. 5 (2020): 618–633, https://doi.org/10.1080/23745118.2020.1709368.

[92] Vermeule, “Against Right Liberalism.”

[93] David Gordon, “Deneen on Liberalism,” Mises Wire (blog), Mises Institute, January 16, 2018, https://mises.org/mises-wire/deneen-liberalism; Zachary Yost, “Anti-Market Conservatives Want to Fix Social Ills, but Their Cure Will Only Make Things Worse,” Mises Wire (blog), Mises Institute, December 3, 2019, https://mises.org/mises-wire/anti-market-conservatives-want-fix-social-ills-their-cure-will-only-make-things-worse.

[94] Hendrikse, “Neo-Illiberalism’; Hendrikse, “The Rise of Neo-Illiberalism.”

[95] Ian Bruff, “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism,” Rethinking Marxism 26, no. 1 (2014): 113–129, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2013.843250; Melinda Cooper, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024); Kochi, “Authoritarian Populism, Democracy and the Long Counter-Revolution of the Radical Right.”

[96] Petchesky, “Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right”; Sue Wise, “ ‘New Right’ or ‘Backlash’? Section 28, Moral Panic and ‘Promoting Homosexuality,’ ” Sociological Research Online 5, no. 1 (2000): 148–157, https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.452.

[97] Michael Freeden, “Ideology and Political Theory,” in The Meaning of Ideology: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Michael Freeden (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007): 3–22.

[98] Alexandra Cole, “Old Right or New Right? The Ideological Positioning of Parties of the Far Right,” European Journal of Political Research 44, no. 2 (2005): 203–230, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2005.00224.x.

[99] J. D. Vance, “Remarks by the Vice President at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, France,” The American Presidency Project, February 11, 2025, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-vice-president-the-artificial-intelligence-action-summit-paris-france.

[100] Raphaël Demias-Morisset, “New Right Technological Agenda(s): Deregulating AI and Digital Capitalism for Illiberal Purposes,” The George Washington University, Illiberalism Studies Program, section: AI, Technology, and Illiberalism, June 11, 2026, https://www.illiberalism.org/new-right-technological-agendas-deregulating-ai-and-digital-capitalism-for-illiberal-purposes/.

[101] Patrick J. Deneen, Chad. C. Pecknold, and Gladden Pappin, “Why DOGE and MAGA Aren’t Matter and Antimatter,” Postliberal Order, March 24, 2025.