How to Be a Populist Republican Conservative

What is the real alternative to liberalism? There is a general agreement that we now live in a ‘post-liberal’ era, but there is very little clarity or agreement about what replaces liberalism or what liberalism is evolving into. At most it seems that some core elements of liberalism are surviving into the new era anyway, so it still debatable whether we are indeed superseding liberalism (or indeed if we should) or simply helping it survive in a new guise.

In recent years three alternatives have appeared as possible rivals to liberalism as a general ideological principle of our societies (albeit with more specific programmatic recommendations remaining still very vague). The first is populism, which emerged in 2016 because of Brexit and Trump as the new major topic of discussion. Populism is generally seen as antithetical to almost all of liberalism’s prescriptions: it opposes independent and counter-majoritarian institutions, it favours political meddling in the field of the economy, it fosters polarization and hates pluralism, and in the particular shape of right-wing populism it seeks to scale back progress of social liberalism since the 1960s in the form of gender rights, multiculturalism etc. Populism’s antithesis to liberalism is such that many commentators now use the term illiberalism as a synonym to populism when referring to populists who have become entrenched in government.

The second alternative to liberalism could well be conservatism. The rise of a new form of global right has fostered important ideological debates that have sought to revisit, revive and reformulate the ideological legacy of conservatism. While for decades conservatism was seen as effectively the right-wing of the dominant coalition of the liberal consensus (as the far right was rather ‘radical’ than ‘conservative’), recent years have seen a shifting of terminology. Increasingly, actors formerly associated with the far right are appropriating the term ‘conservative’ and redefining it at the same time as formerly dominant liberal centre-right forces are either retreating or emulating this rising new right. Conservatism appears as an alternative to liberalism mostly in a moral and aesthetic sense, calling for a reassessment of liberalism’s materialism, economism and social engineering, highlighting that a return to traditional values of family, modesty and territoriality will temper its excesses.

The third alternative to liberalism is the least discussed one, but its importance tacitly underpins many of these debates. The Western republican tradition, as discussed in the works of Pocock and Skinner among others, posited that real democracy lay not in the guarantee of individual rights, as liberals claimed, but in the active participation of an enlightened and virtuous citizenry. The historical ideal of republican thought was the Greek, Roman and Italian city-state, the prototype of a socioeconomically undifferentiated society where citizens of roughly equal wealth and status would debate and deliberate actively about their future. While rarely spelled out in these terms, many of the critiques of the political and economic failures of liberalism in recent decades, starting from the work of Christopher Lasch, reproduce the ideas of the republican tradition. Nostalgia for the era of the Western welfare state for example is not only based on social-democratic values but also because the relative attenuation of the excesses of the market had fostered broad middle-classes organized in mass parties and unions that in turn facilitated political participation. Post-war social-democracy was not only an economic but also a political ideal and probably the only period in time where some of the ideals of the republican tradition – obligation, duty, participation, civic responsibility – were realized on a mass scale. By the same token, much of the malaise today is seen as a result of liberalism’s excessive ideology of rights diluting these republican ideals, leading to passivity, inequality and manipulation.

While each on their own these ideologies formulate important critiques of liberalism, I am doubtful that either of them provides a viable alternative to it, simply because all of them share important overlaps with liberalism and in some aspects are its extensions. Populism may contradict liberalism’s individualism, rationalism and institutionalism, but it still is fundamentally an ideology of political representation that simply substitutes the official state for the populist movement or leader as the single embodiment of a society’s multitude. Even if the actor it seeks to represent and the entity in which the represented can be embodied differs from liberalism, populism still shares with it the same fundamentally Hobbesian logic of differentiation between the represented and the representative, as evidenced in the immense power that populist movements vest in the hands of their leaders who act as tribunes for the ‘people’. Populism simply replaces rights with unmediated contact and mobilization as the main link between the people and official power, but the underlying logic stays the same. Populism’s main gripe with liberalism is the latter’s technocratic impulses more than its logic of rights and representation.

Conservatism on the other hand is framed as representing values that are considered antithetical to liberalism, yet it is not clear why this is so. Family, thrift, hard work, patriotism and indeed nationalism were all strong values of the early bourgeois middle class, the ideology of the so-called ‘classical liberalism’. By the mid-19th century, the borders between liberalism and conservatism had become very difficult to disentangle, as both sides endorsed a free economy and a limited franchise (albeit for different philosophical reasons), equally opposed to mass democracy and relying on the power of the state to police property and civic rights. Defining conservatism today in these terms merely updates a nostalgia for a ‘genuine’ liberalism lost to the excesses of endless new rights claims. Of course, one can claim that the original classical liberalism simply appropriated many of the values and standards of morality of the dominant aristocratic class it displaced, but even a liberal-conservative synthesis today would simply remedy some of the excesses of liberalism while leaving intact others.

The problem with republicanism is in many ways the reverse of conservatism. Translated in today’s context, e.g. in the work of Pettit, republicanism is little more than a more sophisticated articulation of progressive social liberalism, focusing on a notion of freedom as emancipation and a positive fulfilment of humans’ desires. Arguably the full republican ideal of the virtuous citizen is difficult to realize in today’s modern Western societies, but even so it is telling that such efforts to update republicanism inevitably trend towards the progressive end of social liberalism, adopting its individualistic goals (positive freedom, emancipation) while jettisoning republicanism’s procedural aspect of civic participation as duty. That they do so however is a reflection of republicanism’s original similarities with liberalism at the moment of their birth in the 17th century: despite their key difference in their understanding of liberty, they both were anti-authoritarian emancipatory movements seeking to curtail royal absolutism.

I submit that all three of populism, conservatism and republicanism offer important tools to counter the liberal hegemony today, but none can do so fully on its own. Rather, their anti-liberal potential can only be realized in a synthesis of all three on the basis of their main overlaps that contravene liberalism’s key tenets. The principles of this synthesis are the only way for one to be consistently anti-liberal today. 

The first common feature of populism, republicanism and conservatism (PRC) is their anti-individualism, which crucially is different from collectivism. These three ideologies are not collectivist because they all respect the dignity and uniqueness of the individual within the political community they envisage. However, they also reject the idea that the individual is prior to this community, as liberalism maintains. The individual’s dignity and rights are fulfilled within a specific community he is a part of and which forms his identity. Ontologically and morally, all three of PRC reject the abstraction of the ‘man in the state of nature’. And being a member of a broader community also means that the individual has specific duties towards it as much as derives certain rights from it. The broader entities that the individual belongs to – the people, the nation or whatever else – are of course allowed to be internally diverse and pluralist. But pluralism is understood as something that can only be realized within specific boundaries, a specific society with a clear sense of division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

Second, PRC is anti-statist. By this I don’t mean the stale neoliberal anti-statism of mainstream conservatism of the last 40 years, nor even the radical anti-statism of the social-liberal left that considers the state a source of oppression. What I mean is an opposition to the classical idea of liberalism that society is brought together and maintained by the state as the main guarantor of individual rights and provider of security. Liberalism’s contractual view of society sees the state as the necessary precondition for the existence of organized civic life – the state is endowed by the social contract to keep the peace and protect society from its enemies. While the common view of liberalism is that it prioritizes society over the state, whose power is curtailed by a web of independent institutions, courts, agencies etc., in reality liberalism merely stipulates the distinction between state and society. The relationship between the two is quite open-ended depending on the circumstances: laws ensure the state’s limitation vis-à-vis society, but liberalism contains within itself the exceptions and reasons for which the state will extend its powers over society, all the way to the Schmittian ‘state of exception’. PRC, each for their own reason, view society as primary to the state and, in their most advanced forms, even collapse the difference between the two to the benefit of society. In any case, all three reject the notion of the state as an untouchable guarantor and regulator and the unchecked power of its elites. 

Third, PRC is anti-market. Again, this is not meant in the conventional ways of modern left/right politics (which are a product of the era of liberalism in any case) i.e. as an expression of socialism, opposition to private property etc. Rather, PRC oppose the primacy, separation and independence of the market from society as pronounced by liberalism. Rather, the market is a social institution that emerges from within society and that operates according to its principles, values and norms. For this reason, it can be more effectively regulated and tamed by traditional social norms and forms of social self-organization than by the state and its constant efforts at overreach. If anything, state regulations contribute to gigantism, since only big market actors can cope with the rules and regulations imposed by the state. The limits and rules that society naturally and organically imposes on the market on the other hand, such as bottom-up modes of societal organization and self-defence, are much more effective at keeping the market manageable. In any case, the market is not prior or higher than society. Much like the state, it flows from and it is subsumed inside society and its priorities.

Fourth, and flowing from the above, PRC prioritize and support the small, the modest and the limited versus the big, the overwhelming and the uncontrolled. The big vs. small divide can indeed be understood as the main political and economic cleavage that animates all three of these ideologies (for different reasons for each of them). Big state just as much as big business are a threat to the autonomy of the individual and the primacy of society and its civic institutions. While liberalism in theory also supports the small scale through its guarantee of rights and the free operation of the market, in reality it prioritizes the ever-enlarging scale: the unfettered free market leads to big business which then requires big government to regulate it which in turn fosters ever bigger consolidation of business capable to deal with an ever-larger set of regulations. For all three components of PRC on the other hand, big scale is a threat to the political autonomy of the people, the traditional forms of life of a society and for its civic culture. Big sizes dehumanize society and undermine the preconditions for a functioning civic life.

Fifth, PRC are self-consciously partial political ideologies, in the sense that their ideal vision of political life is typically embodied in the idealized lifestyle of a specific political constituency: the ‘real people’ in the case of populism, the democratic community of civically minded virtuous property owners in republicanism, some aristocratic elite or the representatives of a hierarchical institution in conservatism. While each of these ideologies has a different reference point and idealized form of political life, they all reject liberalism’s universalist perspective of the bare-bones individual human as bearer of a specific set of natural rights. Rather, the ideal life for PRC is embodied in a specific group or class. While broader strata can be attracted to this vision of life, the values and experiences of this privileged group are always the guiding light. Most importantly, the way of life of this privileged group entitles it to make decisions about the future of the political community, by acting as the main agent and space of deliberation and civic engagement. This means that in practical politics PRC should appear as the political expression of a specific societal group or class, even though it can reach out beyond this core of support.

Sixth, PRC is anti-absolutist. This may appear paradoxical for populism, which is of course preoccupied with absolute sovereignty as popular sovereignty. And indeed, this final characteristic may apply more to republicanism and conservatism, which acquire thus a slightly stronger weight in the synthesis. The issue here concerns liberalism’s idea that political power needs to be concentrated in one actor who then serves as sovereign authority – the state. In the history of liberalism many different forces have tried to act as the sovereign: absolutist and enlightened monarchs, modernizing elements of the aristocracy and ultimately the ‘people’ have served as sovereigns or as sources of authority for the state’s unified power. Whatever the precise form of sovereignty, under liberalism it is presumed that supreme political authority is unified and concentrated in a single actor i.e. it is absolute. 

Republicanism and conservatism however reject absolutism, albeit for different reasons and with different ideas as to how sovereign political authority must be diluted and disestablished. For republicanism, political authority lies with the political community whose prerogatives however are balanced with other sources of authority like aristocracy and monarchy – the ‘mixed constitution’. Conservatism on the other hand by definition stands for diluted and polycentric political authority, having historically represented precisely the interests of social forces that the quest for centralized absolute sovereignty sidelined: the church, the aristocracy, the traditional monarchy.

The principle of anti-absolutism plays out in practice for a pluralist and balanced polity. Of course, the idea of balance and control of political power is to be found also in liberalism, with its preoccupation with independent institutions checking political authority. However, in liberalism the notion of balance is one-sided, preoccupied with how different minorities can curtail and control the power of the majority. But a fuller perspective of balance would also work in the other direction: ensuring that the majority also has ways to wrest control from an entrenched minority that rules in the name of rights and independence of institutions, technocratic agencies, expertise etc. Without falling in the trap of full-blown illiberal authoritarianism, republicanism and conservatism look for ways that the liberal state can be subject to broader popular control (of the civic community for republicans, of the broader society espousing traditional and moral values for conservatives). And in this way, paradoxically, their opposition to singular and centralized sovereignty and their quest for the dilution of political power can find a (procedural if not substantial) ally in populism, which is always opposed to the elites’ monopolization of state power. Altogether, the PRC synthesis aims for a deconstruction of absolute sovereignty in its different components and prefers a mix of different forms and legitimating bases of political authority balancing each other.

In sum, to be consistently anti-liberal means to adopt a populist republican conservative synthesis, understood as the overlap between these three ideologies that sidelines the elements that each of them inevitably shares with liberalism. The main principles of this synthesis are duty, deliberation and balance. Duty both in the sense of civic duty and duty towards society’s values and traditions. Deliberation in the sense that politics is about subjecting public issues to rational dialogue and contestation between available choices, contra technocratic de-politicization. And balance in both the political and economic sense: balance between minority and majority (against liberalism’s bias towards technocratic elites but also without falling in the temptation of majoritarian authoritarianism), and balance between big and small in the market. And ultimately, balance against any concentration of power in the hands of the absolute sovereign. 

Ultimately, to be a populist republican conservative is to resist any concentration of power and to seek to diffuse and devolve it, preferably to forms of social organization with a long organically evolved tradition and moral authority capable of sustaining and reproducing loyalty to them. All this adds up to the central value of this synthesis which is autonomy towards the state, the market and external actors, which however can only be realized within and via society.