Long War

THERE IS NO VIABLE ALTERNATIVE TO LIBERALISM:

Postliberalism’s Hungary Gambit Failed (Thomas D. Howes, 4/22/26, Civitas Outlook)

In the debates about postliberalism since Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed appeared in 2017, postliberals and their friends (e.g., Kevin Roberts) would that conservatives needed to stop fearing the use of power; some of their close friends in the new right would even echo Carl Schmitt, saying that in politics you need to reward friends and punish enemies; they would ask rhetorically “do you not know what time it is?”; others would dismiss proceduralism as an obstacle to promoting the common good. Among postliberal intellectuals, Adrian Vermeule opposed Madisonian, called for a more powerful and bureaucracy, and said we would be better off; Gladden Pappin bragged about the organizations that were formed to Trump loyalists to fill government positions; Christopher Rufo said these kinds of efforts, which included DOGE (a brainchild of Curtis Yarvin), were an “,” an effort to install a new elite, which echoed the arguments of Patrick Deneen’s book Regime Change. What they learned from Viktor Orbán was that you could decrease the separation of powers and weaken the checks and balances of a government by filling strategic positions with loyalists.

Postliberals also pushed a dubious economic agenda. Power should be used, they argued, to shape the economy; was all the rage, and various forms of right-wing dirigiste strategies were suggested, including 1930s-style corporatism, as it was by Orbán’s employee, Gladden Pappin. Viktor Orbán not only resisted mass immigration (as his replacement, Peter Magyar, does), but he also, they argued, saved Hungarians from the “globalists” who were hollowing out industry with their doctrine of free trade.

So, when Dreher admits Orbán’s loss was about the economy and corruption, postliberal’s conservative critics rightly gasp. Those are precisely the things we warned about—using political power to create advantages for your political party, stifling political speech, rejecting proceduralism for partisan advantage, and misguided economic policies that make countries poorer. The argument was primarily about corruption and poor economic policy. One might argue that more autocratic control is not intrinsically corrupt, but opponents of postliberalism always saw corruption as one of its consequences; and even then, Orban’s autocratic tendencies, his attempts to tip the scales to secure more power for himself and his party, were certainly a good part of what Magyar and his voters opposed.

Postliberals are a minority in American politics, but they punch well above their weight. They are well organized, operate in lockstep, and are loyal to one another—they behave in many ways like the leftists who for decades carried out a strategy of a “long march through the institutions.” Like Joseph de Maistre, one of their intellectual forebears, they believe that social revolutions succeed from the top down, through strategically placed elites. The more transparent their unpopular project, the less successful it will be. They are willing to talk in popular fora about their movement as a populist one, about a fight against the “globalists” and mass immigration, when it is far more about acquiring power for a much less popular social project—this is especially the case for the integralist faction (e.g., Vermeule and Pappin). They want to remove limits on the executive branch’s power, fill the government with loyalists, and form a compliant court, all for someone who shares their comprehensive vision (e.g., Vance).

The fall of the Orbán government not only cut off a huge amount of postliberal funding, but it also exposed their project to further scrutiny. They are leaving Hungary embarrassed and rejected by the Hungarian people. This also leaves them with no political power. Any near-future prospect they have is tied to J.D. Vance, whose power in turn depends on Donald Trump. We have seen many of Vance’s friends already thrown under the bus by Trump, particularly Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. It is unclear whether Trump even likes Vance or will endorse him. The 2028 primaries are a long way away in Trump time.

Donald is going to force JD out and replace him with Marco.

YOU CAN’T BE BOTH CHRISTIAN AND MAGA:

Trump, Leo, and the Death of Integralism (Stephen Daisley, April 20, 2026, First Things)

Wait until the quixotic utopianism of the Catholic integralists encounters the final boss of postliberal politics: immigration. While many faithful American integralists will submit to the pope’s instruction, the Catholic Church’s pronouncements on immigration attack concepts as fundamental to Republican politics today as freedom and enterprise were in the Reagan and Bush years.

Even if some accommodation could be reached between Catholic social teaching and either Republican postliberalism or Democratic economic justice, such an arrangement would be agonizingly fragile in a polity where executive power can change every four years and legislative power every two. Orbán’s illiberal democracy, which he has spent the past sixteen years embedding in the institutions and culture of Hungarian national life, looks set to be dissolved by a successor keen to embrace all the European Union diktats Orbán’s ascendancy was predicated on opposing. On how a postliberal order can be developed into a society organized around material and spiritual virtue, integralism has few convincing answers. On how such an order would be maintained against the vicissitudes of democracy, it has no answers.

Integralists will not like hearing it, but there is already a means by which to live faithfully, extol the doctrines of the Church, and contribute to the forging of a common good society. Their old enemy, liberalism, properly understood, gives the Catholic holder of public office the freedom to live a life integrated to the eternal verities and ordered to virtue, while exercising temporal power under the law with ex officio neutrality, and promoting a culture conducive to religious devotion in which the faithful are secure from coercive state secularism. It is an imperfect model, it does not always deliver victory, and its concepts and mechanisms have been directed to un-Christian and anti-Christian ends and will be again. That is all the more reason to fight for the proper understanding and application of liberalism, and thus the right and ability of the faith to flourish in “enemy” territory, rather than taking the political Catholic tradition out of the mainstream and into the coercive, authoritarian fringe.

WHO’S YOUR DADDY?:

There’s a moral vacuum at the core of JD Vance (Gerard Baker, April 16 2026, Times uk)

Everyone makes moral compromises but they are manageable because there is at least some essential identity, an irreducible core that is something more than the sum of our appetites and ambitions. But the uniquely strange trajectory of Vance’s career strongly suggests there is no identity there, only the appetites and ambitions to be served by whichever principles work best.

This is a man who has changed almost everything about himself to accommodate new realities. From his name (he was once James David Bowman) to his faith (he was once an evangelical Protestant) to his political allegiance (he once pondered fearfully whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler”). And he is still constantly changing his mind (in that New York Times story it was said that while he was at first against the war, he then argued for a limited war and then for an all-out war, all in the space of a fortnight). When you look, in other words, for Vance’s defining identity, the soul of his true self, there is nothing there, only a pile of receipts from a succession of useful transactions.

His entire life has been driven by the need to be loved by his newest father figure.

MAGA IS UNAMERICAN:

The Grand Budapest Cartel (James M. Patterso,n April 15, 2026, Providence)

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism.

How is that possible? How did this happen?

The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

TIME TO JETTISON THE DARWINIST RIGHT:

Knowing What Time It Is: What will our politics look like after Christianity? A tour of the post-religious right. (John Ehrett, March 23, 2026, Plough)

Ample evidence now suggests that post-religious conservatism is producing its own “successor ideology.” It manifests in divergent forms – from a technological maximalism that demands ever-greater transcendence of the body, to a primitivism fixated on physical strength, various imputed statistical differences between races, and (not quite ironically) phrenology. Its metrics are sets and reps, per capita statistics, and the marks on calipers. Its trajectories are complementary: they are grounded in a dawning conviction that human politics and society are fundamentally defined by biology and its resultant hierarchies. Rebelling against the body’s limits, or fixating upon them, both treat the body – rather than the immortal soul – as the primordial political term. And these moves follow organically from the dechristianization of the right.

The post-religious right will have its own creeds, however implicit. And it will inevitably find itself at odds with the Christian humanist tradition whose mantle it still claims.

By world-historical standards, American conservatism has been strikingly egalitarian in character. To many, that claim may sound outrageous, given America’s history of chattel slavery and mistreatment of Native American tribes. But by the standards of the left-right binary first formulated around the time of the French Revolution – with “left” meaning a taste for equality, and “right” an affinity for hierarchy – the American conservative experience looks decidedly nonhierarchical.

America imported no rigid system of social class from Europe. Its leaders did not, as in France, justify their rule by recourse to a sacred bloodline. Its founding authorities did not enshrine a metaphysical caste principle, along the lines of India’s ancient Laws of Manu. But Americans who claim the mantle of “conservative” – a term of preservation and stewardship – cannot escape the reality that the American tradition they conserve is bound up with the Declaration of Independence’s searing maxim: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Just who are all these men who are created equal? For many in the founding generation, black Americans, Native Americans, and others didn’t qualify. But attempts to enforce biopolitical hierarchies were always profoundly unstable. Whether consciously or not, slave owners were trapped in a paradox, committed to asserting the subhumanity of their slaves as the justification for their oppression while simultaneously living in perpetual fear of a freedom-seeking revolt – the very act of human self-determination epitomized by the Revolution itself. In time, and after much bloodshed, the logic of the Declaration won out. Those originally excluded from the American project of self-government on racial grounds proved entirely capable of being due, demanding, and receiving the rights enumerated in it.

COPING:

Cognitive dissonance helps explain why Trump supporters remain loyal, new research suggests (Eric W. Dolan, April 11, 2026, PsyPost)

A third study took place in October 2022, just after Trump was arraigned for his involvement in the January 6 Capitol attack. The scientists recruited 187 participants who had voted for Trump in the 2020 election. These individuals read an article summarizing the public hearings regarding the events of January 6.

After reading the summary, participants answered questions about how accurate they felt the information was and whether it made them feel bothered or uncomfortable. This step allowed the researchers to measure the actual emotional discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance. Participants then wrote open-ended responses explaining how they reconciled their support with reports of illegal election interference.

The results from the third study echoed the earlier findings, though participants relied even more heavily on disbelief. Over 60 percent of the respondents claimed the accusations regarding election interference and the Capitol attack were false. A small minority of participants, about 13 percent, noted that they had supported Trump in the past but no longer did so after learning about his actions.

The researchers found a positive association between feeling bothered by the news article and expressing disbelief in the allegations. Participants who experienced higher levels of mental discomfort were more likely to claim the accusations were fabricated. This suggests that the denial is not just a calm rejection of information, but rather a direct response to the psychological distress of cognitive dissonance.

From a psychological perspective, these responses represent novel ways to reduce mental friction. For instance, arguing that a politician’s personal life does not matter is a way of conceptually separating, or compartmentalizing, conflicting pieces of information. By making the personal misconduct seem completely irrelevant to political leadership, individuals can successfully eliminate their mental tension.

AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?:

The Multipolarity Trap: How a KGB talking point became a staple of American right-wing discourse (Park MacDougald, April 07, 2026, Tablet)

At the time, this struck us as a strange argument to make at a nominally “America First” conference. Multipolarity, after all, was originally conceived by the Russian intelligence services as a tool to weaken the West. It was first formulated by Yevgeny Primakov, a KGB Arabist who served as foreign minister under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and has since been popularized internationally by the state-backed Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. In essence, multipolarity opposes “unipolar” U.S. dominance in favor of an arrangement in which Russia and its allies, China and Iran, are granted freedom of action in their respective “spheres of influence.” Over time, the idea has worked its way into the propaganda of China and Iran and the arguments of their Western sympathizers.

While phrased as an essentially defensive arrangement against American “globalism,” multipolarity is, in practice, a strategy for Communist-Islamist world domination. U.S. grand strategy since World War II is premised on the idea of “forward defense” in the Eurasian rimland, which runs from continental Europe to the Middle East and on to coastal Asia, and which is home to most of the world’s people and economic activity. Without control of the rimland, presently secured by the combination of U.S. naval power and Washington’s system of alliances, the United States would become a second-tier “hemispheric” power. For elements of the isolationist right, the appeal of being a “hemispheric” power in a “multipolar” world is no doubt that it would rule out further U.S. military entanglements in far-flung locations while allowing us to shed the costs of maintaining our “empire.” But exchanging lucrative economic and defense partnerships with Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for stronger relations with El Salvador and Peru is hardly a recipe for increasing American military power or national wealth. Instead, it would be the greatest self-own in the history of geopolitics—a recipe for making America radically poorer and less secure, and therefore subject to the dictates of more powerful countries like China. Which one suspects is the point.

In reality, it’s an ever more unipolar world.