The post-liberal Right's war on America's founding — and why it's not conservative

By Mikale Olson, Op-ed contributor Monday, August 31, 2026

There is a fight happening on the American Right that is much bigger than Donald Trump, immigration, abortion or the latest culture-war controversies. 

It's a fight over the American political order itself.

For generations, conservatives broadly understood that the American constitutional system was worth defending. In short, that’s what conservatism is: the active preservation of the American proposition. They could disagree about policy while sharing a principled commitment to natural rights, limited government, constitutionalism, private property, religious liberty, free speech and the rule of law.

But now, the new, post-liberal Right increasingly rejects that fundamental framework.

Patrick Deneen (JD Vance’s personal mentor), Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari and others have built an intellectual movement around the argument that liberalism itself is the problem. JD Vance has openly identified with the post-liberal Right and has praised Deneen’s work.

This is an important distinction because by “liberalism,” they do not simply mean the modern Democratic Party. They mean the political philosophy of the American constitutional order — the very philosophy conservatism seeks to conserve.

And that is where the post-liberal project becomes, quite frankly, anti-American.

The Founders vs. the post-liberals

Start with the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson wrote: “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.”

Then comes the purpose of government: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.”

Notice the order.

Rights come first. Government comes second.

Government does not create your fundamental rights. It exists to safeguard them. Period. 

Now compare that philosophy with Patrick Deneen’s.

Deneen’s central argument in his book Why Liberalism Failed is summed up in his famous (infamous) line: “Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded.”

Deneen does not merely argue that the modern Left has abandoned the principles of the American Founding and it’s up to the Right to recover it. He argues that liberalism (the politics of the American founding) itself produced the problems we are experiencing. He explicitly describes liberalism as the philosophy “put into effect at the birth of the United States.” 

His next book was titled Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Deneen calls for the “vigorous overthrow” of the liberal ruling class; a new founding — the creation of a “postliberal order.”

That is not conservatism. It is Right-wing coded authoritarian regime change. Full stop. 

The question is therefore not merely whether the Right should fight the radical Left. Of course it should fight bad ideas and destructive, Left-wing coded post-liberal policies.

The question is whether the solution is to restore the American constitutional system (true liberalism) or replace it with something fundamentally different.

The problem with the 'right people' argument

This is where post-liberalism makes its most important mistake.

The modern Left has absolutely abused government power. It has used bureaucracies, universities, corporations, and other institutions to advance ideological objectives. The Right is right to oppose this.

But the answer cannot simply be to seize, and expand, as JD Vance has repeatedly argued, the same machinery and put different people — his “friends” —  behind the controls.

That is precisely what the Founders were trying to prevent.

James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

And: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

Madison’s point was simple. You do not build a free society on the assumption that the right people will always be in power. You build it around precisely the opposite truth —  that people are fallen, sinful, selfishly ambitious, and hellbent on abusing power.

That is why the Founders divided power. They did not ask, “Who should control the machine?” They asked, “How do we make sure nobody can control too much of it?”

That is the fundamental difference between constitutional conservatism and post-liberalism on both sides now.

The common good problem

Adrian Vermeule’s, for one example, “common-good constitutionalism” makes the disagreement even clearer.

Vermeule argues: “Rights, properly understood, are always ordered to the common good.”

That may sound reasonable at the surface. Of course government should pursue justice and the common good. But there is an enormous question hiding inside that phrase.

Who decides what the common good requires?

And what happens when those in power decide that your God-given rights conflict with their conception of the common good?

Under the American Founding’s natural-rights framework, government exists to secure rights that precede government. In other words, if the opposing political party assumes office, your rights don’t vanish. That’s the unique magic of the American system. 

But under the post-liberal framework, just like the radical Left, rights can be understood as subordinate to a higher conception of “the common good.” You, the individual, are irrelevant to the “needs of the collective.” Sound familiar to the Marxist Left?

That difference is not academic.

It determines whether your rights are genuine restraints on government or privileges that government can override when it decides the circumstances require it.

If the state can take away your liberty because politicians believe doing so serves the common good, then the state ultimately becomes the judge of the boundaries of your liberty — it, frankly, plays the role of God.

That is exactly the framework the American Founders rejected on both pragmatic and theological grounds. 

The post-liberal Right and the Marxist Left have more in common than they think

Here is the irony.

The post-liberal Right and the radical Marxist Left obviously disagree about what society should look like.

One emphasizes tradition, Christianity, family, national identity, hierarchy, and social order.

The other emphasizes class, “economic equality”/equity, material redistribution, and revolutionary social transformation.

But beneath those enormous differences is a shared rejection of liberal constitutionalism. (Deneen even admitted he pulls much of his work from the Marxist Left.)

Both believe the existing constitutional order is fundamentally inadequate to achieve their desired ends.

Both are willing to subordinate individual rights to a higher political or social objective.

Both believe political authority can legitimately become much more expansive when it is used for the “right” purposes.

And both ultimately face the same question: Who gets to wield the power?

The Marxist says the revolutionary vanguard.

The post-liberal says the people who understand the “common good” (to be determined what that means by those who assume ultimate power) and are willing to govern accordingly.

The traditional American conservative gives a different answer — nobody gets that much power.

That is the brilliance of the American system.

The goal was never to find a faction virtuous enough to control the state without restraints. The goal was to restrain the state, even from your friends, because no faction is virtuous enough to be trusted with unlimited power.

The progressive Left already tried the alternative

There is another irony.

If we want to understand how America developed the modern administrative state, we should look at the progressive rejection of the older constitutional framework.

Progressive thinkers such as Woodrow Wilson explicitly criticized the Founders’ system of separated powers and argued that government needed to evolve beyond the 18th-century constitutional model.

The result was an increasingly centralized administrative state.

So, when conservatives correctly identify the modern administrative state as a problem, the answer should not be to conclude that constitutional limits themselves failed.

The answer should be to restore them.

The cure for the Left’s rejection of constitutionalism cannot be another rejection of constitutionalism.

'Suspending' the Constitution

This is why proposals to suspend constitutional restraints in the name of restoring order should be treated as a serious red line.

Harrison Smith has recently argued along those lines in a conversation with Joel Webbon, claiming we need to suspend the Constitution in order to allegedly save it. 

But the principle is straightforward enough to evaluate.

If constitutional restraints can be suspended whenever leaders decide that a crisis is sufficiently serious, then those restraints are not really restraints.

The Constitution does contain narrow emergency provisions, including the suspension of habeas corpus in cases of rebellion or invasion when public safety requires it. That is a constitutional power exercised under constitutional conditions. It is not a general authorization for leaders to suspend the constitutional order whenever they believe it is necessary.

This distinction matters because every authoritarian movement believes its emergency is unique.

Every faction believes its enemies are uniquely dangerous.

Every faction believes its own use of extraordinary power will be temporary and justified.

Then the other faction wins.

And suddenly the machine remains, but someone else is operating it.

What conservatives should actually restore

The choice before the Right is not between progressive Left-wing post-liberalism and Right-wing post-liberalism. Those who seek unbound ultimate power for themselves would like to convince Americans of this false dilemma, pointing to the sins of the opposition as justification for their totalitarian aims. 

They don’t want Americans to know there is another option — the one we’ve already been given. 

Recover the American constitutional tradition.

Natural rights.

Limited government.

Religious liberty.

Free speech.

Private property.

Due process.

Federalism.

Separation of powers.

Constitutional restraints.

A government strong enough to protect the country and enforce legitimate laws but limited enough that it cannot become the master of the people it governs.

The American founding was not perfect. The Founders themselves failed to apply their principles consistently, most obviously in the existence of slavery.

But the answer to that inconsistency was not to abandon the principles themselves. The principles became the standard by which America could be judged and eventually reformed.

That is the strength of the American idea.

The Declaration does not say government gives us our rights. It says government exists to secure rights that come from our creator.

Madison does not say we need virtuous rulers with unlimited power. He says we need constitutional mechanisms because men are not angels.

That is the American answer to political corruption.

Not more virtuous tyrants, but limited rulers.

The post-liberal Right and the radical Marxist Left may disagree about almost everything they want to do with political power. But they increasingly share the same basic premise: the constitutional order is an obstacle standing between them and the society they want to build.

That is why both are post-liberal.

They are fighting over who gets to wield the machine.

The American Founders were trying to build a political system in which nobody could wield the machine that way in the first place.

If conservatives abandon that distinction, they cease to be conservative and will not restore America or create lasting order. They will simply replace one authoritarian project with another.

And that is not the American way.

It is the abandonment of the American political tradition altogether.

Use discernment, friends. It’s needed now more than ever.