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Paul Kelly, "Against Postliberalism: Why ‘Family, Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left" (Polity, 2025)
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Paul Kelly
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Tim Jones
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Tim Jones (Intro)
This is the second podcast in a two parter on post Liberals, the new intellectual tribe encompassing pro Brexit workerism in the UK all the way to tech billionaire Aristo populism in the us. After my discussion with Matt Sleet last week, which focused on the American conservative movement. Today I'm talking to Paul Kelly about his book against Post Liberalism, which looks more at the British variant and how, in his words, it offers a dead end for the left. Paul Kelly is a professor of Political philosophy at the London School of Economics and heads its Department of Government. I'm Tim Jones and this is the 242 podcast with new books in European Polit.
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Tim Jones
Well, I opened my interview with Matt Sleet by admitting that I didn't know until I read either of your books that there was something called post liberalism. I'd assumed it was a portmanteau term to cover anything from national conservatism to left Gaulism. So what made you decide to focus on it specifically?
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Paul Kelly
So I began thinking about this in relation to the emergence of blue labor with the likes of Maurice Glassman and John Cruddas and Adrian Pabst and so on, following the coalition government's victory over Brown. So following that, this group started to rethink a new political economy for the Labour Party. And it was sort of a bit of social conservatism, but looking at a different way of thinking about the economy beyond the boundaries of what they said was Blair Brown third way compromise with global neoliberalism. So I started working on that. Other things came up in my career and then it appeared that one, what had started off as a sort of left challenge to Labour's political economy orthodoxy had started to shift more to the right on sort of social and political conservatism. And then post 2016 Brexit had turned much more populist, but with the added fact that you now had this appearing in the United States. So what I was looking at was a broad political movement which then started to have people self identifying as post liberals. And I suppose if I was to compare myself to Matt Sleet, Matt focuses very much on the political philosophy of these self identifying post liberals, whereas I was trying to do that, but also capture a broader movement. So that's where I started with things like Blue Labor. But Philip Blonde's Red Toryism goes in and a few other things, possibly national conservatism, which I've then tried to characterize in this broader sense. So my interest was political and then political philosophical.
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Tim Jones
So you started from looking at this Blue labor movement rather than post liberalism or national conservatism in itself.
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Paul Kelly
Well, when I started looking at it, post liberalism wasn't a sort of major political force. There was a place where it existed. So if one steps a bit further back in the history, you know, the movement for radical orthodoxy with people like John Milbank, were starting to talk about a post liberal perspective, a way of trying to break out of the very broad philosophical framework that they characterize as liberalism. And this is more than just the dominance of neoliberalism as a political economic form. So political theory, theology, some philosophy people like Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor had always being kind of post liberals and the word was used, but it hadn't really identified as a movement. So I came to it as these things were converging into a sort of movement. And some of the same players sort of appear in both places. So Adrian Pabst and John Milbank, they're not Blue labor thinkers, but they were there with Blue Labour. And one of Millbank's students, Philippe Blonde on the right, was the sort of advocate for Red Toryism. But these were sort of British political movements or sub movements that were really challenging I suppose the major orthodoxy that Blair and Brown had tried to establish, Clinton and so on in the US which came to a kind of abrupt end in 2008 and the financial crisis, and a lot of people sort of turning against globalism of various kinds. So that's really when I started to see something that could be characterized as a sort of intellectual political movement called post liberalism. And as I say, then some figures, Patrick Deneen and then others around him expressly identified as post liberals.
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Tim Jones
Well, I guess that's where we should go next, because I guess some people will be quite baffled that you can have a label for a political, essentially a political movement that encompasses left and right. So as a scene setter, could you set out your understanding of post liberalism and its foundations?
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Paul Kelly
So my book tries to do two things. I mean, one, it is a deliberate engagement, a critical engagement, post liberalism. So the against bit, which we'll probably talk about later, is part of the book. But central to what I was trying to do was to identify a way of framing a post liberal perspective. And I identified what I sort of semi mischievously call three faces of this trinity which makes up post liberalism. The first is its engagement or link to a kind of populist analysis of politics. So that's the sort of national populism, which sees politics as dominated by various kind of elites who are increasingly remote from the masses that they dominate and control. And that sort of populist challenge that does span both the political right very much with sort of Trump and Farage and so on. But also it's traditionally also a left discourse. You go back to Gramsci and so on and so forth. So that's the first element. So there's an important populist dimension which challenges in different ways global liberalism's democracy. The second element is a commitment to politics of the common good. And I call this common good communitarianism. So here you have a kind of response to neoliberalism's challenge to the lived experience of political and moral communities with its preoccupation with rights. And instead, the communitarian, the common good communitarian, seeks a way of renewing or recovering, so renewing kind of left, recovering from the right, a politics of the common good, okay? And that then sort of can be broken down into the importance of, and the priority of associative obligations, membership, you know, as the subtitle says, you know, faith, family and flag groupings out of which our actual identities emerge and from which political claims are ultimately justified. And then I turn to a third Strand, which I think is most striking with the American post liberals. And this is to turn that communitarian common good politics into an authoritarian politics. Because one of the challenges of common good politics in Western democracies is of course we all have different candidates for what is the common good. Everyone's in favor of the family, but they have different views about what can be a family, what are the boundaries of family, community, what's on and what's off the agenda for regulation and so on. So the problem that the common good communitarians confront is pluralism. Now, where the more sort of authoritarian absolutist common good theorists come in is they have a strong conception of the common good, what I often call a common good with a definite article. So there really is a common good, not many common goods. And that common good, because it's authoritative and singular, is the basis for a kind of authoritarian paternalistic politics that narrows the scope of liberal toleration and so on that could possibly come out even of a communitarian politics. So it's those three things, populism, common good, and then the authoritarian turn that goes with it.
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Tim Jones
I wondered whether there was another factor. I mean, you are quite explicit about the religious element to many of these thinkers. Many are Catholics and quite a lot of the British ones are high Anglicans. Have you come across any who aren't? And you also mention they have many people they believe are enemies of the people. But one of them is the new atheist movement. Are there any, to your knowledge, any atheists in this movement?
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Paul Kelly
I can't name any non theistic post liberals. There's one bit I would sort of qualify here because I'm very mindful of my cast of characters, particularly for the authoritarians are all going to be. Be sort of out of a religious movement. The left has this. Okay, so it isn't only a religious perspective that gives rise to a strong conception or a singular conception of the common good. I mean, it's kind of classic Leninism. Yes. Where in a sense the proletarian consciousness is determined by given content, by the leadership of the party. So there's a curious. And this is sort of one of the things that was always interesting to me, that you have a very un. Classic Marxist, Leninist world of view in politics which sort of mirrors that structure.
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Tim Jones
You begin your argument with Michel Foucault.
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Paul Kelly
Yeah.
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Tim Jones
And quite a lot of this is this. I don't know whether Gramsci himself said it, but this idea of false consciousness that seems to be really embedded in their thinking.
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Paul Kelly
Yes. And of course that leads to sectarian politics. It leads to candidate elite groups, very closed. And of course it's not what we think of as liberal democratic. They have their own story about how they're democratic, but it's democracy within one organization. The biggest story for me in terms of the post liberal challenge to broad based philosophical liberalism is that you have this return to a kind of authoritarian politics and worldview that was very familiar in the 30s and up to the 40s and obviously went out of fashion post 1945 where these models this way of thinking about politics, whether it was the hardcore Leninist left, whether it was left challenges to that Gramscianism, whether it was on the political right, but you had integral or internally focused conceptions of the political good which were then presented to the wider political community but didn't depend on, in a sense, bottom up endorsement. That's my kind of complicated answer to your question, who is this? But it is out there. So it's not, you know, I do give the example of integralist Catholicism because Patrick Duneen and Adrian Vermulli followed that. And as you say, you see some of that with the Anglicans, the High Anglicans, the Milbank and so on. But it isn't just a religious movement. It is a movement that draws on these encompassing worldviews. Religions are perhaps the easiest way to show people. Last point, I suppose on your new Atheists. I mean, to an extent when you think of Sam Harris and you think of Dawkins and Pinker, less so, but in a way they also wanted to kind of build a conception of liberal atheist globalism. Didn't quite catch on, doesn't have a social movement behind it. But they wanted not just in a sense to assert atheists just have one less belief than theists. They kind of wanted a worldview that could animate a politics domestically for controlling the claims of multicultural communities, for religious accommodation, by which they meant Muslim immigrants and globally for confronting similar sorts of regimes or Baathist nationalism or something like that. So it kind of connected with neoconservative foreign policy, but in a way there was that element to the movement of the new atheists.
- [15:42]
Tim Jones
Yeah, that's a good point. And you make a direct link at the end of the book between neoliberalism and its. I think you describe it as his foreign policy cousin, neoconservatism. And that is probably true and certainly was true of Sam Harris, for example, back in 20 years ago in that respect, especially in your discussion quite early in the book of Danny Kruger, David goodhop Matt Goodwin, I think you described them more as the commentariat of post liberalism rather than their thinkers. They almost seem to communicate a deliberate destruction of traditional communal life by neoliberal forces. The economic arm of neoliberalism is hollowing out working class communities. The new atheists have robbed them of their religious associations and then the universities indoctrinate their children. In the British case, I think of, for example, a mining town, the young people leaving the mining town, moving to the metropole. And in the Metropole they're indoctrinated with all sorts of woke ideas. Is that a worldview that you think is shared by some of the more serious thinkers as well as the commentariat?
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Paul Kelly
Yes, I think it is. I think it's more stridently presented amongst the commentariat because they kind of foreground the populist discourse and they really focus on that. So the names you mentioned that I talk about. So Goodwin, perhaps most extreme now, but David Goodhart, a lot of people around Policy Exchange, they do draw on this story about how, for all of its good works, the liberal welfare transformation of Britain has had a big downside. It's undermined political communities. Lived experience and meritocracy in particular has created this opposition between the beneficiaries of rapid social change. People like myself who went off to university became comfortable middle class opinion leaders and those who didn't. And I kind of have lived through that in some way, although I'm not from a mining community, but I was first in my family to go to university and all those sorts of things. So they're beneficiaries and then there's the left behind and their focus is very much on that. Now in the US context, of course, that's very much where Patrick Deneen really becomes important because it wasn't his first work in the field, but his major book that was picked up by Barack Obama, why Liberalism Failed, is very much this idea. It eviscerates the lived experience of communities and so on. And it ties nicely with, you know, J.D. vance's backstory hillbilly elegy. You know, it's that kind of these were once, you know, not sophisticated but viable communities in which people lived and found meaning. And that's been destroyed by this promise of change and so on and so forth. So there is an element of that and it's very much focused on the sort of populist critique of liberal capitalism. In a way, it's all in Christopher Lasch, the American social historian who wrote about this 40 years ago. How this sort of elite politics taken up, and lash is very clear about this. It's taken up by the liberal left as its future once it abandons class politics and. And how that's actually destroyed the communities that it was supposed to protect. But then the challenge is, yes, I mean, if that's the analysis, what do you do about it? What I don't do, although I'm a political scientist and I do know a bit about this, is say, a bit about whether or not that argument is actually any good and overstated. There are things that kind of lean into endorsing part of that story, the brilliant book Brexit Land, which is about how the relationship between working class views about migration and so on, and the displacement that culminates in the Brexit vote, that covers some of this. And it's interesting that Matt Goodwin sort of cut his teeth on this political science before he became an advocate or a strong commentator with a political angle. There is something to explore, but it's also more complicated than that. There's a debate to have over that. Politics is always about the recycling of elites. And political parties do that. The idea that there is a sort of homogenous mass that's long gone in our politics, and you see that in sort of party dealignment and voting figures and all the rest of it. And also the way people identify. So class identification. I met the university system with lots of people who sort of come up, like me, who possibly still describe themselves as working class. Although they're in the top 3% of the income distribution, they haven't been in a working class community for 50 years. Class identification is a very different thing from actual kind of an objective analysis of your position. And political society is particularly Britain, certainly the United States are much, much more complicated in terms of who the people are, what the mass is. So it's a very simplistic model, but it's attractive to those who kind of look up at what's the source of all of my problems or why am I not feeling. This was one of the big debates that grew up around why people sort of voted for or possibly voted against their economic interests in favor of Brexit. And it was partly because there's this perception that, however the clever clogs present this to say that overall, we all benefit from globalization. Not everybody feels that. To be told that on average, they're better off than before, they don't feel that. And you still see some of that in the present politics of the US where people voted for Trump because they were unhappy with Biden economic policies and so on, and they were objectively not in their interest. But that's not really the point. It's not that they make an informed mistake. Political identification and so on is much more complex. That's the bit that the populists play on. And it works whether it's true or not. I think that's the important point.
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Paul Kelly
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Paul Kelly
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Tim Jones
To this and I certainly felt it reading both the books was these people have got all sorts of ideas about what's wrong and it's very easy to attack so called neoliberal elites. But as you put it post liberal's greatest challenge is quote this shift from a critical theory of modern politics to an account of what is to be done particularly in challenging liberal policy. It seemed to me that of all the people you looked at, the only one who really thought these issues through was John Cruddas in terms of what could be done to address the left behinds and not in a way of just bombarding them with welfare, which is of course the approach that's been taken in Hungary and Poland. These same kind of governments came to office, but they addressed the issue by creating a big welfare state targeted at their people. Brexiteers and the Trump people tried the opposite of actually trying to reassure jobs and it doesn't seem to have gone well. First of all, am I right about Crudus? And secondly, are there other people who are coming up with potential practical solutions to the things they're complaining about?
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Paul Kelly
The practical solutions is a very current debate because of course, one of Cruddas sort of associates, particularly in politics of barking years ago fighting the British national party was Morgan McSweeney, who is now the senior advisor to Keir Starmer. And there's a lot of debate about whether or not that's a sort of blue labor post liberal agenda, the sort of abandonment of a kind of very left liberal view of rights and so on, and a much more robust social conservatism, as well as engaging with or taking as unchallenged the post Brexit settlement tinkering at the edges. So possibly this is one way to go. But I don't want to speak for John. I do know him a bit, but I think his concern, particularly with those early advocates of blue labor. So the blue labor post liberalism like Maurice Glassman, is that they found it politically easier with the populist dynamic of British and American politics to shift to the right on things like rights and take particularly tough, rhetorically tough stances on migration and so on, and do rather less of the promised rethinking political economy. And for John, this I think I can say fairly, his concern wasn't simply its neoliberal globalization or reshoring jobs, but it was really to think about the place of work, industrial policy and that level of planning which, to be fair, even people like Johnson talked about they didn't do, was the discourse of leveling up and all the rest of it. So I think he's in that, in trying to work out what the real policies are. When you look at others who go down that route, I want to go on too long, but you look at Adrian Pabst and John Milbank have a lovely, long, complex book, but it covers absolutely everything. And in some respects its advocacy is to completely transform political economy International relations and so on. So it's a sort of extreme utopianism. And then you're kind of back with what the Marxists who are still in the academy would do, which is say, well, assume you get rid of capitalist modernity. What would we then then do? And I'm possibly interested in that. But actually getting rid of capitalist modernity, we're not good at that. We don't know what it means. Previous attempts to do it didn't end well. It's too big, I think. And this is the sort of liberal conclusion. I think it's actually not a political view. I think if your view is actually to change all the parameters of current politics in order to do politics, then you're not really thinking politically.
- [28:27]
Tim Jones
You're clearly frustrated by the post liberals unwillingness to face up to modernity or admit to the need for coercion. If they're going to get what they want and you very helpfully offer them Carl Schmitt as a route to reactionary revolution, were you trolling them or were you actually trying to force a choice there?
- [28:46]
Paul Kelly
So, no, no, no, no. If you look at the authoritarian common good people, and here particularly somebody like Adrian Vermuler, I mean Vermuller is a Schmittian. There's a number of different sort of factions on the US Right who very much take their politics from Schmidt. And for the good reason that despite his dubious political choices, Schmidt was a Nazi, had a party number and all. It didn't end well for him, but he was actually a Nazi. But Schmidt was also one of the most perceptive and challenging critics of liberal modernity, the liberal state, liberal political economy, which of course he theorized through the 1930s in the context of the failure of what he called an artificial liberal democracy, the Weimar Republic, but also the domination of two big rival global powers, the United States, with its imperial move into world politics following the first war and then of course, Bolshevism. So Schmidt is important because he raises a challenge. And although, you know, he's not been a good company in polite society amongst political theorists, he's been there because you have to deal with it. I think you can. I think liberalism has got answers to that. I know on the critical theory left, you know, Jurgen Habermas has been doing this kind of all his career. So there's something to be said there. I wanted to foreground this because of course Schmidt really is the thinker they go to. And Vermuller's very particular about this. You know, the whole model of Strong executive presidency straight out of Schmidt. And he wouldn't deny that. He'd just say, well, let's not talk about how this went wrong. In the past, Schmidt made a calculation that the conservatives joining with the Nazis would open up the opportunity for a military leader. Hindenburg, he didn't do it. Hitler kind of took over. We're stuck with it. But the plan was really to have that kind of strong executive president who would force conformity and he would have then destroyed the Nazis, but also the Communists and everybody else. That's what Schmidt wanted. He wanted a sort of Franco type dictator with concentrated executive power. And that's where they go. Because that's the bit that gives political order and allows us to deal with the real challenges that politics presents, which could be plutocratic wealth, could be rival views that we don't want, that challenge the core traditions of our society and so on. It's very similar to the sort of model that's been adopted by the Chinese Communist Party. They're sort of rethinking of who they are and what they're doing. It's a sort of Schmittian model of executive domination. And that is the authoritarian bit. Is it strong in the uk? Well, it's there with some people, yes.
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Tim Jones
I mean, you quote Samuel Moyn as making the argument that it was this very reaction to totalitarian politics on the left and the right, that that essentially is modern liberalism's original sin because it turned it into a, quote, empty conceptual holding position and without the resources of ambitions to defend itself. And that sounds right. But then if I think about autoliberalism, the German tradition or militant democracy, do you think those are an argument against that position or the fact that they were kind of minority positions, something that was essentially only adopted in one country and didn't really export?
- [32:42]
Paul Kelly
Autoliberalism is kind of interesting, but it shares something that Moyn sees as problematic for them. Auto liberalism tried to build a thin conception of a common good in order to balance economic powers and interests and to create stability and order. So in that sense, it's back with the main currency of 20th century European liberalism. Post 1945 Popper, Raymond Auron in France, Hayek and all of these other figures who are the problem for Moyne, because they basically argue liberalism needs a conception of the common good, it can't have it. So it's got to think of some other way of configuring the scope of politics. There isn't a common good to be brought in to rescue us. That's the Risk and the problem of conflict. So Sam, in one sense is right in the diagnosis of what's missing, but it's unhelpful because of course they're all aware of this. They just say that, yeah, that's what we can't have, or how do we get it? What's the sort of epistemological story for the philosophical theoretical people? Or what example of the narrow sort of take up of autoliberalism? Who is the constituency or the internal faction in state democracies who are going to run this alternative model of political and social organization? And then of course with the auto liberals, and where they link to the neoliberals, of course, is this has to be certainly a transnational and. And possibly a global enterprise. You can't do this in one country. The context as well as the content is the challenge. And that is also the problem that confronts liberalism. And then the question is, what do you do about it?
- [34:49]
Tim Jones
You run through that debate between Dworkin and Rawls about whether liberalism should have a definition of common good and if so, what it is. Where do you fall on that? Because it seems to me that liberalism can have that and they're quite simple things like personal prosperity, personal freedom and so on. Is that too simplistic? Where do you fall on that biographically?
- [35:10]
Paul Kelly
Once I was going to write a book on Dworkin, spent a long time and then didn't do it. And partly I didn't do it because I kind of fell out with the perspective. So I had an initial interest in this idea of a comprehensive liberalism, as he calls it, which is a sort of strong doctrine, or it might be a relatively thin conception of the common good, but it's one that is authoritative and links to a constitutional theory and a model of politics and law and so on. And I saw that as being increasingly problematic. And coming back to the fundamental challenge of what I think is contemporary politics, not just for liberals, but for everybody, which is the fact of reasonable pluralism in a broadly democratic order. If you're going to have a broadly democratic order, you're going to have structural disagreement about people. You don't have homogeneity. So that kind of shifted me back to Rawls and especially to his rethinking of his own position. So his 1972 theory of justice was a way of dealing with that. But later on in the 90s, he has this significant, what I think is quite a significant radical change to what he calls a political liberalism. And here his argument is that you can still separate out Your fundamental conception of the good and your commitments to a reasonable scheme of social cooperation, of just political order. But you have to think about it in a certain kind of way. Does he settle the debate? Absolutely not. Kind of. Liberal theories never are final. This is an agenda rather than sort of fixing all the questions. But I think it's the way to go for the future, to look for the terms of cooperation between people who are sufficiently motivated to try and get on. So that's the first bit. And of course there will be some social fissures where that just doesn't work, failed multination states and so on. But in most liberal states, the terms are how do we get on with each other? And then how does that work? Particularly in circumstances where you have some significant conflicts which are not Schmittian of who's in and who's out, who's friend, whose enemy, but effectively that when you come to fundamental policies. And if you think of an illustration in the UK at the moment, you know, think of assisted dying, you know, which is a pretty radical issue that cuts across more than just faith communities and people without. But it goes to the fundamental heart of what a good society for both groups, what a good society, what a decent political order is. And it touches on life and death. In the US, the way in which abortion was handled under Roe vs Wade was catastrophic in the same space. So even within a liberal, broadly liberal state, you have these kind of radical challenges. And that's why I think a comprehensive common good that solves those questions doesn't work. And just to illustrate that briefly, I think if you think about the way in which abortion was dealt with in the United States and in the UK broadly, we were a bit earlier in the uk, abortion was legislated by Parliament. It creates a sort of civil permission right, but it's a political right that's given by the state and it can take it away. It doesn't require anybody to rethink or to deny their fundamental moral commitments if they still think it's immoral or a moral crime. In the United States, there is a right and therefore others are wrong. And that's much harder to manage. Where you go to the heart of people's fundamental conception and say, yeah, but you're wrong, you're wrong on this. Sometimes you do it slavery, but they had a civil war over that. You have to be kind of careful about this. And of course, as I say, there are models of dealing with this which allow people to speak about rights, but the rights are in a different order. In a parliamentary legislative model. They're legal rights that are conferred by states which could be changed. And that always leaves people one with the prospect of campaigning or modifying or doing whatever they want. But fundamentally, it doesn't require them to admit they're wrong. And that's the hard bit. And I think that shows how, you know, even in domestic politics, fundamental conflicts emerge.