Interview: Merion West Contributor Matt McManus on “Postmodern Conservatism”

“So, I finished my Ph.D. in 2017, and, at the time, Donald Trump had just been elected President of the United States. Like a lot of people, I was a bit perplexed and disturbed by what happened.”

Matt McManus is a professor of politics and international relations at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico and holds a Ph.D. from York University. In addition to being a frequent Merion West contributor, McManus writes at a number of magazines and is the author of the books Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law and The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism. In this interview, he joins Merion West and Allen Zheng to discuss his recently published essay collection What is Post-Modern Conservatism, which was assembled in collaboration with a few fellow authors. Zheng and McManus discuss the origin of the essay collection, as well as McManus’ general thoughts on how best to conduct political discourse, and his upcoming co-authored book on Jordan Peterson.

Can you talk a little bit about the process you took to write this book?

So, I finished my Ph.D. in 2017, and, at the time, Donald Trump had just been elected President of the United States. Like a lot of people, I was a bit perplexed and disturbed by what happened. Full disclosure: I thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win—not that I was very enthusiastic about that. This really persuaded me to go back and take another serious look at the history of conservative thought, which I hadn’t done for a few years and try to get a better understanding of what had happened. So I went back and started reading some of the classic text: people like Joseph de Maistre, as well as taking a second or third look at Roger Scruton. What I realized was that there was a lot of overlap between the arguments and positions that I was seeing articulated by those figures and the arguments and positions I associate with modern leftists philosophers.