Britain’s Post-Liberal Disorder

A month ago, the defeat of Viktor Orban’s Fidesz Party in Hungary prompted a round of hopeful liberal commentary about a possible ebb tide for populism and nationalism. Orban’s government had self-consciously sought to nurture a “post-liberal” intelligentsia, and there was a particular enthusiasm for the idea that its defeat could roll back the post-liberal impulse across the Western world, simply by depriving its would-be mouthpieces of junkets and stipends and academic conferences.

I wrote skeptically about that thesis just after the election, but now I want to offer a specific case study in why the post-liberal era isn’t about to be rolled back: the latest round of council elections in Britain, in which the government of Keir Starmer, an embodiment of centrist liberalism, suffered an expected but still catastrophic defeat.

One obvious headline from the election is the continuing success of the Reform Party, the populist start-up led by Nigel Farage. Reform is now more popular than either Starmer’s Labour or the floundering Tories, and Farage stands an excellent chance of becoming prime minister after the next national election. Since it’s also possible that the leader of the populist National Rally in France, Jordan Bardella, will claim that country’s presidency in 2027, there’s a plausible future where the West after Donald Trump features nationalists in power in both London and Paris, regardless of what happens in Washington.

But the resilience of nationalist politics, the extent to which what used to be called the “far right” simply is the mainstream right in Western democracies, isn’t the story that I want to emphasize. What we should be talking about when we talk about post-liberalism isn’t the resilience of a specific ideology but rather the persistence of a general political situation — a set of conditions that obtains regardless of whether Orban or Trump or Farage holds power, a crisis of Western governance that exists independently of populist think-tankery or reactionary blueprints.

You can see this crisis in Britain by looking not just at Reform’s council pickups but also at the broad context of those victories: A totally fragmented electoral landscape in which nobody, Reform included, is close to an impressive plurality of the vote. A radicalization among younger progressives that has made the Green Party the natural party of the left. The success of nationalist parties in Wales as well as in Scotland, and the rise of a specifically English nationalism as a novel right-wing force. The rise of ethnic and sectarian candidates who are winning the votes of Muslim immigrants in British cities, often campaigning on Gaza rather than local issues. The increasing threat of ethno-religious conflict, manifest not just in native-immigrant divides but also in rising antisemitism and tension between different immigrant groups (Hindu and Muslim, especially).

This toxic landscape is the post-liberal situation. It’s a crisis of normal politics brought on by three great forces: the rapid aging and low birthrates of developed economies, the turn to mass immigration as a demographic solution that brings various racial and religious tensions in its train, and the internet as a source not just of radicalization but also of doomerism and paralysis and an insta-disillusionment with political leaders. (All this with the effects of artificial intelligence pending and uncertain.)

Because the situation is so multifaceted, with social and cultural and technological components that persist no matter what happens in elections, you cannot get your hands around it simply by having a set of designated villains and planning their defeat.

This does not mean that intellectual and ideological arguments are pointless. If you think the right-wing academics and scribblers who identify with “post-liberal” politics are thickheaded and semi-fascist and making the Western crisis worse, by all means say so. But don’t deceive yourself that the reason that Nigel Farage is likely to be the next prime minister of Britain is that too many impressionable Brits were misled by Patrick Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed.”

The same critique applies to the right’s approach to power. The Trump administration was elected, in part, because of a recoil against post-liberal impulses on the progressive left — a climate of censoriousness and ideological manias and anti-white discrimination. As such, the administration had good reason to pick fights over funding for universities and the government-NGO complex, and to treat wokeness and its associated practices as enemies and foils.

But you do not create stable conditions for a conservative governance just by penalizing universities for D.E.I. overreach or doing a three-month Muskian sprint to defund progressive NGOs. That might be how you prevent the wrong set of ideas from establishing themselves, but it’s not how you govern in the absence of consensus, or how you establish a new consensus that can last.

Winning the governance battle under post-liberal conditions requires something more difficult and less ideologically satisfying. It requires, for conservatives, finding a fiscal policy that somehow redistributes less to the old and more to the young despite the veto power that older voters hold. Or an immigration policy whose restrictions can last for more than one election cycle. Or a political strategy that keeps a decent number of swing voters on your side, under social and technological conditions that undermine majorities the instant they are won. Or a moral vision that draws on deeper sources than the thin post-Cold War consensus without seeming intolerant or sectarian.

Or at the very least, not starting a Middle Eastern war without an exit strategy.

I am a (relative) optimist that America will eventually address these challenges successfully, and one source of my optimism is the European situation, which illustrates various ways our own position could be worse.

But progress, by any faction, requires a recognition that temporarily defeating an ideological rival does not change the conditions that you’re both trying to master. An unstable, seemingly ungovernable environment will always offer opportunities to put your enemies to rout. It’s what you do afterward that counts.