What is a “Post-Modern Conservative”?

“As Harry Frankfurt of On Bullshit indicated, a liar is someone who still has some tangential sense of what the truth is. They are aware of what is true and choose to dishonestly present the opposite. This is not true of Mr. Trump and his acolytes.”

Over the last several months, my co-authors and I have written extensively on the topic of post-modern conservatism (simultaneously rejecting objective truth while promoting right-leaning attitudes) and its emergence as a populist force with political heft. Many of these pieces either discussed the intellectual origins of post-modern conservatism in the historicism and particularism of thinkers like Joseph de Maistre and Robert Bork, the socio-economic and technological preconditions for its emergence, or the paranoia and irrationality underpinning its worldview. These articles each presented a piece of a more complex puzzle about why post-modern conservatism emerges, what it will do, and its political ambitions and practices.

In this article, I am attempting to respond to some justifiable criticism that many of these pieces are excessively abstract. They operate primarily at a general level, discussing broad topics in intellectual history, social theory, and current events across the globe.

Instead of engaging with such grandiose themes here, I will present a short list of characteristics I feel one can use to identify and categorize post-modern conservatism in its most common manifestations. This may help to concretize the main ideas for those who may be sympathetic to my arguments but are nonetheless unsure of how they can be positively applied to help us better interpret and change the world.

Before I begin, I would like to offer two caveats to this position. Firstly, when characterizing post-modern conservatives, I, by no means, intend to imply that the category applies to all those who identify with conservatism or who hold right-wing views. Conservatism is a complex outlook with a deep history and is neither one thing nor the other. Its post-modern variant is just the latest variation to emerge and is by no means the only one. Indeed, some conservative figures are staunchly opposed to the rise and emergence of post-modern conservatism and have pushed against it with a vengeance. This includes many natural law conservatives, right-wing Roman Catholics, a significant number of neoliberals and so on.