Right-Wing Reaction to Liberal Individualism

The crisis of the liberal international order is a result of the erosion of this consensus. The most obvious source of the shift is the disappearance of the Cold War’s ideological glue: opposition to Communism. Another lies in the ascendance of more “progressive” liberal forces, which made alliances with conservatives less tenable. But above all, the crisis reflects an implosion within conservatism itself, transforming it from a supporter of the LIO into one of its most powerful opponents.

This implosion can be seen across each of the four pillars. In the case of human rights, the previous consensus on modern, liberal individualism as the basis for universal rights has been challenged by conservatives. They argue that such individualism produces anomie and societal breakdown, while empowering a transnational liberal judiciary and “New Class” of experts that undermine national traditions, sovereignty, and social solidarity.

“Lamestream” conservatives stand accused of being the enablers of this elite and the destructive forces it has unleashed — paying lip service to traditional values and institutions while actually being party to the commodification of individuals and cultures, thereby weakening traditional social bonds and national allegiances.

As one prominent popularizer of “national conservatism” put it:

To the extent that Anglo-American conservatism has become confused with liberalism, it has, for just this reason, become incapable of conserving anything at all. Indeed, in our day, conservatives have largely become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path.

The aggressive reassertion of cultural identity and particularity by many conservatives today is part of this reaction. Attacks on identity politics are another, with liberal assertions about the malleability of identities derided as assaults on what is “human” in new and insidious forms.

What some view as progressive social values underpinning liberalism are redefined by contemporary conservatism as the sin of progressivism itself: the belief that traditional values and institutions should be swept aside and replaced by universal individual rights administered by technocratic experts. The radicalization of cultural conflicts follows logically from this reframing, tearing apart the postwar consensus on the Right and its role in constructing the postwar LIO.

These arguments are by no means new. Conservative thinkers have voiced them for well over a century. What is new is their urgency, popularity, and overt hostility toward consensus conservatism and compromises with liberalism. They represent a backlash against exactly the kinds of conservatism that helped construct the postwar LIO.

Whereas the postwar consensus generally embraced a view of individuality that even nationalist conservatives could endorse to different degrees, today’s human rights discourses are presented as attempts to enforce conformity with contemporary progressive values — destroying the integrity of the person and empowering progressive legal and normative attacks on traditional identities. The institutions of the LIO — the United Nations, the European Union, and international legal organizations — are no longer seen as pillars of a liberal order that conservatives can live with. They have become adversaries that need to be defeated.

The Right’s Turn Against Liberal Guardianship

The relationship between liberalism and democracy marks a second and equally significant line of division, raising the charge that liberal elites are a threat to democratic governance, not its guardians. The fusion of liberalism and democracy was one of the great ideological accomplishments of postwar politics, one that conservatives played a key role in creating and consolidating. Both Cold War liberals and consensus conservatives stressed the importance of institutions that could insulate liberal democracy from illiberal mass democratic movements, a maneuver that successfully marginalized its critics on both the Left and the Right.

Here, too, that consensus has unraveled. Much of contemporary conservatism is engaged in a frontal assault on the idea that liberalism and democracy are simply two sides of the same coin. Institutions once revered as bulwarks of stability are attacked by many conservatives as bastions of un- or antidemocratic domination by the liberal elite and its consensus conservative allies.

International legal institutions are the particular focus of this hostility, though they are hardly alone. More generally, state bureaucracies and international organizations are cast by the radical right as part a globalizing “administrative state” that thwarts popular will and acts instead in the interests of the global “managerial elites” who staff and direct it. Multilateralism is portrayed as a threat to national democracy, not as a mechanism for its defense. The very ideas of expertise and institution-building toward shared social purposes — once one of the most powerful ideological defences of the LIO — are now among its greatest weaknesses.

Finally, skepticism or outright hostility toward global markets has become so strikingly apparent through the policies of the Trump administration that it scarcely needs emphasis. Yet it is important to recognize the magnitude of this shift and to note that its roots long predate the arrival of the current occupant of the White House.

While conservatives continue to venerate the Margaret Thatcher–Ronald Reagan era for turning the electoral tide and prosecuting hawkish Cold War geopolitics, they reject what they identify as the neoliberalism-masquerading-as-conservatism behind economic globalization. Unlimited conservative support for the free market fractured stable communities and undermined traditional institutions and values of religion and family — the very thing conservatives claim to defend. On this view, consensus conservatism contributed to liberalism’s triumph rather than opposing it.

As Oren Cass puts it, “Unfortunately, conservative economics was supplanted on the American right-of-center for the past 40 years by market fundamentalism. . . . Conservatives relinquished any right to advance a vision beyond free individuals exercising free choice in the market, each presumably able to maximize his own life.” By contrast, the rise of economic nationalism and social conservatism advocated by figures such as Vice President J. D. Vance represent the return of “actual conservatism.”

The Right’s Elegy for Western Progress

For the Right, populism is a response to economic dislocation and the LIO’s denial of the legitimacy of “traditional” conservative identities, ways of life, and nationalist values. It is not an inchoate reaction to cultural dislocation or fears of being “left behind.” On the contrary, it represents the revival of authentic conservative ideas that for decades were marginalized by the Cold War consensus and that now seek to overthrow it. The “backlash” against economic globalization cannot be understood without attention to these cultural themes and the attacks on liberal and conservative elites they enable.

The positions taken by President Donald Trump and his allies are only the most prominent evidence of the fracturing of the previous conservative consensus around open international markets. What unifies these actors is hostility not only toward liberalism but also toward a consensus conservatism no longer able to suppress such hostility from political prominence.

The alternatives proposed by conservative critics are not always clear, but a renewed focus on industrial strategies, state intervention, and restrictions on trade mark significant shifts in conservative economic doctrine and its support for the LIO. Neo-mercantilism, together with at least rhetorical backing for the displaced or “forgotten” working class, has become a feature of conservative actors across the world, particularly in its Atlantic core. This is usually fused with suspicion or outright hostility toward migration, and with claims that the combined effects of global capital and mass migration have undermined “traditional” communities and mores. Conservatism’s future may be up for grabs, but a return to consensus is not.

A final challenge concerns the geopolitical imaginary of the West. In the postwar era, this generally took the form of a culturally privileged West standing at the top of a hierarchical, but nonetheless potentially universalizable order of individual and sovereign rights. Positions differed on how far, how fast, and how deep this process of Westernization, modernization, and “progress” could run. But even if many consensus conservatives were skeptical of the ambitions of Wilsonian liberalism or modernization theories, they, like their liberal interlocutors, retained a basic faith in the power and prospects of liberal democracy and a belief that its spread was inevitable, desirable, or both.

The Liberal International Order Cannot Survive on Liberalism Alone

These shared commitments no longer hold. Rejecting a consensus that stretched from the 1950s through neoconservatism at the turn of the century, many of today’s conservative critics assert the particularity of the West. Western culture, they argue, is not the future of all, nor is it the logical product of managing modernity, interdependence, and societal complexity. It is instead the product of a specific — usually “Judeo-Christian” — tradition, limited to societies where that culture has deep roots and remains resonant.

This political order is not universal. It needs to be defended against its civilizational Others and rivals. It also needs to be revived and defended from liberalism, which is understood to be undermining its intellectual, cultural, and political strength. From this vantage point, liberalism as it has developed over recent decades is one of the enemies of the West, not its essence. The unity of liberalism and the West, which once provided a basis of support for the LIO has fractured at one of its crucial — conservative — foundations.

These shifts mean that it is no longer sufficient to diagnose the challenges to the LIO by focusing on liberalism alone. Without its conservative dimension, the LIO’s ability to defend or reassert itself is severely weakened. A return to the liberal conservatism of the past looks increasingly like a siren call. Even if radical conservative parties fail to achieve government, they have already succeeded in shifting the terms of political debate in ways that deeply undermine previous domestic and international affinities and alliances around the world.

Despite hopes that the “mainstream” would reassert itself, or that the radical right would collapse under the weight of incoherence and incompetence, there are few signs of a restoration of the “adults in the room.” Nor are those opposed to the old conservative consensus likely to recant. In the absence of conservative allies, those who seek to put the LIO back together again face a challenge that goes far beyond liberalism alone.

The consequence is an intellectual and political challenge that, to echo President Xi, has not been seen in at least seventy-five years. Harkening back to the LIO is unlikely to succeed in the absence of its previous conservative supporters. For those seeking alternatives to today’s conservative ascendance, the challenge is to find both new ideas and new alliances inside and across national boundaries. In the absence of such alternatives, the radical right is likely to continue to prevail, and the liberal international order will become an increasingly distant relic of the past.