Lulling the Dreamers to Sleep

In the spring of 2022, Gabriel Schoenfeld noted that “in one of those remarkable inversions of history, the charge that the United States is totalitarian no longer comes from the left but the right, from America’s growing contingent of self-proclaimed “post-liberal” intellectuals.” His piece is an indictment of the likes of Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, Yoram Hazony, Adrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari. I have my own disagreements with some of those writers, which are centered on their strained, ahistorical attempts to reduce America to straw-man Lockeanism, as well as their thinly veiled authoritarianism. But I would be loath to place them on the American right—they are certainly not “conservative” in any sense of the word. However, their thought overlaps with that of many patriotic Americans who are sympathetic to the framers’ Constitution, insofar as both camps identify totalizing tendencies in contemporary American liberalism.