How to save postliberalism Politicians must speak to somewheres and anywheres

We are said to be living in an interregnum. An old way of doing politics and economics is dying, a new one is yet to be born. I’m not so sure. I think the new order is already here. Since 2016, in much of the West, we have been stepping into a postliberal era.

This may, currently, seem counter-intuitive. Donald Trump, the global figure most associated with postliberalism, is alienating electorates across the West and Victor Orbán, the leading European postliberal, has just lost power.

Meanwhile in the UK, Nigel Farage’s insurgency, despite local election success, seems to have hit a ceiling just below 30%, and many mainstream politicians still refuse to accept Reform as a legitimate opponent.

Yet even as Keir Starmer, in his recent last-chance-saloon speech, cast Reform as “dark” and “dangerous”, he was also embracing several postliberal themes: celebrating immigration restriction, regretting the graduate-only route to status and reward, and nationalizing British Steel as an insurance policy in a post-free trade world.

The backdrop to politics for most of my adult life has been metropolitan openness — the market deregulation of the Right plus the moral deregulation of the Left. This combination is now disappearing in the rear-view mirror. Up ahead looms a new postliberal political landscape, one in which centrist liberals and national populists battle it out (with a noisy sub-plot from a green Left).

The neoliberal or hyperliberal era of metropolitan openness, starting in the Eighties, is best summed up in the saying that the Right won the economic argument but the Left won the social argument on equality and rights. There were some differences between center-left and center-right on the size of the state and levels of redistribution and immigration, but also a broad consensus on how to prosper.

Globalism in economics, and legalism in politics, meant a sacrifice of democratic control. But the new consensus brought many benefits. Most people became richer, and society became fairer, especially if you were a woman or a member of a minority group or a clever child from a lower-income family. The expansion of higher education produced a bigger and more permeable elite than in the post-war period. (The 1957 Cabinet was entirely male and public school-educated, and more than half Etonian). The decline of the industrial working class meant many dangerous jobs in heavy industries were replaced with knowledge economy jobs in comfortable offices.

There were also many losers from this consensus, especially outside the greater Southeast, and their number grew after the crash of 2007-8. This was not just about inequality, de-industrialization, and the loss of well-paid jobs for men of average or below average academic ability.

For three deeper trends, trends that have defined Western liberal modernity, also accelerated in these decades. One of them is the further loss of religion. Strong traces of Christian belief still animate public and private life, but mass secularization has removed a handrail of collective ritual and moral guidance.

The changing relationship between the sexes is another. Women’s financial autonomy and mass entry into paid work and public life represents the biggest increase in Western freedom since 1945. But, as Helen Andrews points out, the female domination of institutions such as education and the law is unprecedented, while many men have lost their provider role and found nothing satisfactory in its place. At the same time, fertility has fallen well below replacement rate.

There is a third big shift. Within the lifetime of today’s young adults, the ethnic majority in many Western countries will fall below half of the population. In Britain, the post-1997 liberalization of immigration means that, today, nearly 20% of the population is foreign-born. The white British core has shrunk from almost 90% in 2000 to around 70% today (lower in England). Just 53% of births in 2025 were to white British mothers. Britain is on track to become majority-minority in the 2060s.

The 2016 Brexit vote, and the Trump vote too, was a raucous and disorganized slap in the face to establishment. They were protests, not only by those who felt they had suffered the economic effects of hyperliberalism, but also those who experienced a sense of loss and disorientation from the big cultural shifts.

Democracy worked: imperfectly, of course. After the Brexit vote, a section of the political class tried to reverse the result. When the impasse was broken by Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory, Brexit was indeed done, but the two further promises, to reduce immigration and to start “leveling up” Britain — a direct response to the Brexit vote — were both dramatically broken.

Nonetheless, in 2026, we have shifted towards a new small-c conservative consensus, much of which even a Labour government is forced to adapt to. The loose coalition behind it comprises older, non-graduates from left-behind, “Somewhere” Britain, combined with the many people of all classes and regions who feel the Blair/Cameron settlement is no longer working economically or culturally.

After nearly 40 years of metropolitan openness, the backdrop is now provincial insecurity and this coalition’s new set of priorities: wanting national interest, and national citizen preference, more vigorously pursued; deep anxiety about free-riding, hence the need for tighter control of both immigration and spiraling public welfare; desire for more orderly neighborhoods; rejection of progressive excess; skepticism about both big business and state capacity, but a strong desire to see the latter repaired.

The new consensus is not just the result of reaching a tipping point in the number of losers. There has also been a loss of momentum in the previous settlement. The growth of the professional and managerial class (PMC), the social base of the metropolitan era consensus, has stalled. It now accounts for about 33% of all jobs (13% higher PMC, 20% lower PMC), but that number has increased only six percentage points since 1991, despite the production of ever more graduates with generalist academic qualifications and unrealizable expectations. And that is even before AI replaces so many professional jobs.

This has been accompanied by a loss of confidence in the system of government that has grown up since the Seventies, when what the academic Michael Moran called light-touch “club governance” was replaced with the “regulatory state”. There were good reasons for more accountability and greater legal regulation, but we have overshot and ended up with the bat tunnel-fish disco Britain in which nothing gets built.

After 20 years of stagnant growth, the political class, Left and Right, is being forced to think harder about the gridlock that results from liberalism’s reflex to disperse more power to courts and regulators.

The emerging cross-party consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above. It now includes: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgment that higher education has over-expanded and technical skills have been neglected; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many dropping out of the labor market (only four-in-10 households are net contributors); the need for a rethink on Net Zero, a regional rebalancing to the economy, an openness towards some degree of re-industrialization, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defense, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater pushback against the progressive activist war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarization, anomie and loss of meaning, especially among young people, a concern now focused on social media regulation.

This new consensus tilts more towards the Right bloc (Conservative/Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour/Greens/Liberal Democrats); that does not guarantee the Right will prevail. Minus the skepticism about Net Zero and welfarism, plenty of the above could align with the economics of Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism. Nevertheless, in the short term, internal Labour politics, with or without Starmer, is likely to require more old-school, statist, tax-the-rich Leftism (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive tax regime in the developed world).

But is the new consensus postliberal? There are many schools of postliberalism, each defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on postliberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly unformed as a distinct ideology by contrast with older rivals like socialism, conservatism or liberalism itself.

Yet there are family resemblances between most of the writers who claim the mantle. Liberalism, in most critiques, is seen as a bloodless ideology focusing too much on individual rights, constraints on power and value neutrality. Postliberal critics argue that it stifles democratic governance and dispatches the human needs for community, belonging and meaning to the private sphere.

The American version, associated with some people in the Trump court, is more militant and religious. Writers like Patrick Deneen regard liberalism as a form of nihilism that encourages our worst selves. The religious postliberals believe that the good society requires virtue to precede freedom and, implicitly, demand a return to faith, usually Catholicism. This is more pre-liberal than postliberal.

More mainstream postliberals prioritize the “common good”, but that begs the question of who defines it. Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour, the chief UK variant of postliberalism, is more a vibe — Left on economics, Right on culture — than a political philosophy or policy program. Glasman’s last book is subtitled The Politics of the Common Good but provides no clear answer to the question of how we can arrive at a consensus on it in societies with such diverse interests and values.

In today’s Britain, there is no significant appetite for the illiberalism and religious authoritarianism of US postliberalism, nor for Blue Labour’s hardcore socialist economics and the quaint idea that the working class longs to return to the factories.

Another dead end is nostalgia for an overwhelmingly white Britain. This nostalgia is now found on the ethnonationalist fringe of the postliberal universe among people who also toy with extreme forms of remigration.

Of course, English ethnicity should be allowed to breathe. Ethnicity simply means shared ancestry and the shared habits and history connected to that ancestry. The English ethnicity has always been a relatively open one, as befits a once sea-going people. If it can absorb millions of Irish people over two centuries, then it can certainly absorb people of different racial and religious backgrounds if they come in manageable numbers and assimilate into the national culture (people such as Rishi Sunak, who is stereotypically English in the modern, self-deprecating, patrician manner).

The re-emergence of English ethnicity as a normal identity, after centuries of being submerged in a broader British or Imperial identity, is to be welcomed, not feared. And postliberals are right to stress the enduring importance of both ethnic and broader national identities. In more fragmented societies, a critical mass of people sharing a strong fellow-citizen attachment, regardless of race or ethnicity, is essential to navigating future collective action problems.

In any case, no political party will get elected in modern Britain without accepting, at least in spirit, both of the post-war social revolutions: the welfare revolution of the Forties and Fifties and the equalities revolution of the Sixties and Seventies.

It is also true, on the conservative side of the ledger, that a big reason for the appeal of postliberal ideas is widespread regret at the loss of community and national solidarity, and the related reductions in trust and volunteering. People regret, too, the loss of stable family life: nearly half of British children are not living with both their biological parents at the age of 16. The epidemic of mental fragility and the collapse of birth rates speaks to a malaise — it is tempting to label it a spiritual one — that liberalism, by design, has no answer to.

But modern electorates are both liberal and conservative in complex combinations. The weakening of community and family often happens because people place their own individual freedom and desires first. People want community but many of them want wealth, freedom and mobility more. We might regret losing the sense of a single national conversation when there were only three television channels, but few of us want to give up the choice of entertainment we now enjoy. Most of us have been happy, in Yuval Noah Harari’s phrase, to “give up meaning in exchange for power” — or, he might have said, for comfort.

People don’t want to abandon liberalism; they want a better version stripped of its excesses and silences, economic and cultural. Focusing on liberalism itself as the problem — rather than the recent marriage of economic neoliberalism and progressivism — opens the door to reactionary postliberals who think everything went wrong with Luther or Locke.

We don’t need a revolution: we need a course correction, as Adrian Pabst and other moderate postliberal voices have argued, a politics that speaks to the priorities of the Somewheres at least as much as the Anywheres, without jettisoning pluralism and the essentials of historic liberalism.

Adrian Wooldridge makes a similar point in his book Centrists of the World Unite! He frames his argument as a reinvention of liberalism, but it’s one that overlaps with the kind of postliberalism advocated here: a decidedly un-centrist challenge to the bourgeois-bohemian economic and moral deregulation of the past 40 years.

One way of thinking about postliberalism as a course correction is seeing it as an attempt to reinvigorate some of the background factors that helped liberalism to work better in earlier decades. Liberalism, say postliberals, is parasitic on other forces to thrive: freedom and value neutrality work best in a context of individual restraint, shared norms and demographic stability.

Post-1945 liberalism in the West certainly benefited from factors that are now either absent or weakened: a growing population; rapidly rising incomes; the moral constraints provided by residual religious belief and deference to experts and leaders; stable family life; a single, national media-led, public conversation; large ethnic majorities with a pre-political solidarity (reinforced by the last war) creating a strong “imagined community” and common norms across social classes.

Today, by contrast, we live in low-growth, aging societies, with an archipelago of competing value and interest groups consuming individualized media, with weakened families and national attachments, and with faith in politics badly dented. Liberalism is under strain and needs a helping hand from postliberal priorities, even if the term itself remains too obscure for mainstream debate.

My own version of that helping hand, which I categorize as belonging to the Left-conservative school of postliberalism — a synthesis of moderate social democracy and moderate cultural conservatism — has three main elements.

1. Small-c conservative common sense.

• Acceptance of the moral equality of all humans, but rejection of the moral universalism and post-nationalism of the Left.
• Restoring authority to elected politicians.
• An immigration pause, plus the understanding that a society with a shrinking ethnic core needs an attractive, broad-based national identity more than ever.
• A belief in personal responsibility and reciprocity, entailing a shift to a more contributory welfare state.
• Recognition that money alone is not the answer to poverty and social dysfunction; family structure and upbringing matter too.
• More support for stable families, marriage and higher fertility by minimizing the motherhood penalty, but also by making it easier for one parent to remain at home when children are pre-school.

2. Market-friendly, national social democracy.

• A national preference in public procurement.
• Tougher paternalistic regulation of industries with power to poison bodies (food) and minds (tech).
• Less exposure to the market in some key public utilities but more exposure in areas where competition is weak.
• Transition to Dutch-style social insurance model for health and social care.
• An end to current Net Zero plans; ensure the lowest possible energy costs for businesses and households.
• Limited use of subsidies and tariffs to prioritize national industry, reshoring and innovation, and national control over critical infrastructure/utilities.
• Incentivization of a more patriotic business elite, and clearer distinction in the tax system between the productive and unproductive rich.
• Reduction in the tax/regulatory burden on small businesses.
• Promoting higher levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship, especially among young people.

3. A regional settlement for the crisis of demoralization in Somewhere Britain.

• Tackle extreme regional divides by promoting public investment and growth companies in left-behind areas, plus investing in local institutions: sports clubs, youth clubs, pubs.
• Reverse the over-production of people with generalist academic qualifications and under-production of skilled workers and technicians.
• Create more outlets for public-spiritedness. In a more dangerous world, with a more erratic climate, we need an expanded military reserve plus a civic and environmental taskforce. We also need an easy-to-use online national volunteering platform.

This is not a radical manifesto, but it cuts across still-powerful liberal assumptions in key areas: the reluctance to accept discomfort at rapid ethnic change as legitimate; the economism of so much social policy that focuses only on higher welfare payments; the persistent belief that more graduates is good for the economy and society; the reluctance to rethink rights legislation even when it thwarts democratic common sense.

There are policies here borrowed from Right and Left, but the Right bloc would be most comfortable with it. To turn the cultural dominance of the Right bloc into political power requires, as well as an electoral accommodation between Reform and the Conservatives, two things that it currently lacks: an ability to reach out to centrist voters and a coherent political economy.

Both of these failings are especially, perhaps unavoidably, true of the insurgent Reform. As Farage tacks to the center, with Restore Britain nibbling at his Right flank, he may be able to reduce his unpopularity at the local tennis club. A balanced political economy that can combine some of the productive, deregulatory spirit of the Thatcher years while also protecting, and reforming, the social state and reviving the left-behind parts of the country, remains a work in progress.

Liberalism, as Wooldridge points out, has had several course corrections in its history. The course correction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, via the New Liberals in Britain and Teddy Roosevelt in the US, jettisoned laissez-faire and the sanctity of private property.

Today’s course correction requires nothing more from liberalism than accepting a new balance between the dispersal of power and the need for an effective democracy. As even the raffishly liberal Financial Times writer, Janan Ganesh, has recognized, liberal democracy needs to be a bit less liberal and a bit more democratic.

Historic liberalism is a sensibility as much as an idea or institution. It is built on reasonableness, open-mindedness, good-faith argument, and a willingness not to see opponents as enemies.

This sensibility can no longer be taken for granted, and some variants of postliberalism have contributed to that. But this is a problem that afflicts all political traditions, exacerbated by identity politics on the Left and ethnonationalism on the Right.

Tribalism is on the rise not just because of social media algorithms, but because it’s harder to find compromises when politics is more about culture, values and emotions than about size of the state and levels of redistribution.

It is therefore all the more important that The Rest is Politics centrists learn to accept this new, more cultural terrain of politics and the legitimacy of “decent populist” parties like Reform that eschew racism and ethnonationalism. Rather than demonizing opponents as bigots or elitists, we need a new generation of politicians, on both the liberal and populist sides, who can speak across the Anywhere/Somewhere divide.

After the relative calm of the second half of the 20th century, huge challenges are now piling up. And the ability of politicians to manage them is made more difficult by an increasingly divided and demanding electorate. This explains Britain’s high turnover of prime ministers. If some strands of postliberalism are part of the problem, then the movement’s broader intuitions are a necessary part of the solution.

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A longer version of this essay can be found at David Goodhart’s Substack, A Goodhart is Hard to Find.

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