Image: 'Scaffolding at the Palace of Westminster' by Jordiferrer, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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It is often said that we are living in an interregnum. An old way of doing politics and economics is dying but the 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 post-liberal era.

This may, currently, seem counter-intuitive when Donald Trump, the global figure most associated with post-liberalism, is alienating electorates across the West and Victor Orban the leading European post-liberal has just been ejected from office.

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 post-liberal themes: celebrating immigration restriction, regretting the graduate-only route to status and reward, nationalising 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 while a new post-liberal political landscape looms up ahead in which centrist liberals and national populists battle it out (with a noisy sub-plot from a green Left).

That era of openness, sometimes called hyper-liberalism or neo-liberalism, began in the UK with the Thatcher revolt against a broken post-war social democracy. The first step was a loosening of controls on labour and capital at home and then a further opening of the global economy, especially after China joined the WTO in 2001.

Rapid growth in China and some other parts of the developing world was accompanied by decent, if unspectacular, growth in most of the West, but also by a sharp rise in de-industrialisation, regional imbalances, and education-based status divides in many rich countries.

From the 1980s, to the end of the hyper-liberalisation era in 2016, politics here was best summed up in the slogan that the Right won the economic argument but the Left won the social argument on equality and rights entrenching the values of the 1960s reforms (and as politics, and ultimately economics, is downstream of culture the latter victory was the most important).

One of the key social trends, in the UK and similar countries, was the doubling in size of the professional and managerial class from the 1960s until the 2010s (to around one third of all jobs), with a related expansion of higher education. This produced a light-bulb shaped social structure and a new higher class that merged the traditional elites and asset-rich with the cognitive meritocracy - the exam passing classes - from all levels of society.

This expanded baby boomer elite, that partly overlaps with what I have elsewhere labelled the Anywhere class, oversaw, and in many cases advocated for, a rapid liberalisation of social norms.

In 1980s Britain around half of adults still thought homosexuality was wrong, agreed with the statement ‘a man’s role is to go out to work and a woman’s role is to look after the household’, a super-majority expressed a belief in Christianity and pride in country, fertility levels were still close to the replacement rate of 2.1, most professional people did not have degrees and net immigration was running at less than 5,000 a year.

Forty years later things look very different. One result is that politics has come to revolve as much around education-based liberal/conservative value divides as around the old left-right socio-economic divides.

From the early 1990s until the Brexit vote in 2016 it is fair to say that what the populists call the uniparty in Britain (meaning both the Labour and Conservative parties) agreed on many things: the market reforms of the Thatcher era were largely left in place; residential higher education was expanded and technical/vocational training neglected; industry shrank and professional services (especially finance) became the heart of a regionally imbalanced economy centred on London and the South-East; race, sex, and sexuality, equality and a new rights-based culture advanced, and the social state expanded; immigration rose sharply after 1997; local government was hollowed out and national democratic sovereignty in parliament was increasingly dispersed to the judiciary, regulators and transnational organisations such as the EU.

There were some differences between centre-Left and centre-Right on the size of the state and levels of re-distribution and immigration but also a broad consensus on how to prosper in the age of hyper-liberalism.

Globalism in economics and legalism in politics, meant a sacrifice of democratic control. But this consensus brought many benefits too. 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 open elite than in the post-war period (the 1957 Cabinet was entirely male/public school and more than half Etonian). The gradual disappearance of the industrial working class meant many dirty and dangerous jobs in heavy industries were replaced with knowledge economy jobs in comfortable offices.

There were also many losers from the hyper-liberal consensus, especially outside the greater South East, and their number grew after the financial crash in 2007-8. This was not just about inequality, de-industrialisation, 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 during the decades of metropolitan openness. The further loss of religion is one. It is only in the past couple of generations that mass secularisation has taken hold in most Western countries. Notwithstanding the strong traces of Christian belief that still animate public and private life this 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 has pointed out, the new female domination of key institutions such as education and the law is unprecedented, while many men have lost their role as main provider and found nothing satisfactory in its place. At the same time, fertility has fallen well below replacement.

There is a third deeper 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 opening to immigration means that today nearly 20% of the population is foreign born and the White British core has shrunk from almost 90% in 2000 to around 70% today (lower in England alone). Just 53% of births in 2025 were to White British mothers. Britain is on track to become majority-minority in the 2060s.

The Brexit vote of 2016, and the first Trump vote too, was a raucous and disorganised No! A protest vote from not only those who felt they had suffered the economic consequences of hyper or neo-liberalism but also those who experienced a sense of loss and disorientation from some of those big cultural shifts.

Democracy worked, people could challenge the double liberal consensus at the ballot box. It worked imperfectly, of course. After the Brexit vote a large section of the political class tried to reverse the vote. When the impasse was finally broken by Boris Johnson with his decisive election victory in 2019, Brexit was indeed done but the two further promises to reduce immigration and to start “levelling up” the country—a direct response to the Brexit vote—were both dramatically broken.

Nonetheless, in 2026 we have shifted some way towards a new small-c conservative consensus in British politics and culture, 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 a new set of priorities: wanting the national interest, and national citizen preference, pursued more vigorously; deep anxiety about free riding hence the need for much tighter control of immigration and welfare spending; more orderly neighbourhoods; rejection of progressive excess; scepticism 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 “lanyard class” in Maurice Glasman’s witty formulation, 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 unrealisable expectations. And that is even before AI replaces the more routine knowledge economy jobs.

This has been accompanied by a loss of confidence in the system of government that has grown up since the 1970s when what 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 over-shot and ended up with the bat tunnel/fish disco Britain in which nothing gets built.

After 20 years of stagnant economic growth, the political class, Left and Right, is being forced to think much harder about state capacity and the gridlock that the liberal reflex to disperse more power to courts and regulators can cause.

The emerging cross-party policy consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to understand and hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgement that higher education has over-expanded and that an apprenticeship is as good a start in working life for most young people; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many people dropping out of the labour 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-industrialisation/friend-shoring, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defence, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater push-back against the progressive activist class’s permanent war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarisation, 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 in British politics (Conservative and Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour, Greens and Liberal Democrats), but this does not mean the Right bloc will prevail. Minus the scepticism 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 a further shift to the old-school, statist, tax-the-rich, Left (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive income tax regime in the developed world).

But is the new consensus post-liberal? There are many schools of post-liberalism defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on post-liberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly young and 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 and freedoms, constraints on power and value neutrality. Post-liberal critics argue that is 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, tends to be more religious and militantly hostile towards liberalism. Writers like Patrick Deneen, and the even more radical Adrian Vermeule, regard liberalism as a form of nihilism that encourages our worst selves, especially when combined with free markets. The answer of the religious post-liberals is that the good society requires virtue to precede freedom and, implicitly, demands a return to faith, usually Catholicism. This sounds more pre-liberal than post-liberal.

The more mainstream post-liberal critique of liberalism is that it is hard to derive a galvanising idea of the public or national interest from it because it is designed to accommodate an endless variety of individual beliefs and priorities, and to disperse power as widely as possible. Modus Vivendi liberalism demands that if you pay your taxes and obey the law you must be tolerated even if you are an Islamic separatist preaching hatred of the West.

Not only is this, say the post-liberals, a recipe for parallel societies but for stasis too. Liberalism makes it hard to challenge existing power structures, controlled by the highly educated Anywheres, whose priorities continue to dominate regardless of election results.

Post-liberalism’s answer is to pursue the ‘common good’ but that begs the question of who defines it? Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour, the best-known variant of post-liberalism in the UK, is more a vibe—left on economics, right on culture—than a political philosophy or policy programme. 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 the common good in modern societies with diverse interests and values.

The answer of Patrick Deneen, the pre-eminent American post-liberal, is that a more virtuous and responsive elite will derive a sense of the common good from the common people. How the post-liberal society actually comes into being is left a bit hazy. His colleague Gladden Pappin recently explained to me that “the common good is defined through partisan political struggle.” This could just mean multi-party democratic competition but, to my ear, it also has echoes of Carl Schmitt’s famous friend/enemy political frame, which now seems to define US politics in the Trump era.*

This is one of several post-liberal dead ends. In today’s Britain there is no significant appetite for the illiberalism and religious authoritarianism of some strands of US post-liberalism, nor for Blue Labour’s hard-core socialist economics and the quaint idea that working class people long to go back to working in factories.

Nostalgia is not always a sin but as Samuel Rubinstein has written: “To recreate thick communities in an age of global supply chains, digital media, and geographic mobility, in societies characterised by deep pluralism and heterogeneity… seems like a pretty tall order.”

Another dead end is nostalgia for a mainly white Britain now to be found on the ethno-nationalist fringe of the post-liberal universe among people who also toy with extreme forms of re-migration, even for citizens with settlement rights.

Of course, English ethnicity exists and 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).

It is true that having been semi-submerged for a couple of centuries within a broader British and imperial identity, Englishness has a more fuzzy feel to it than say French identity. And then the asymmetrical multi-culturalism that emerged in the 1960s, encouraging minority ethnic expression but discouraging that of the majority, further muddied the water. The re-emergence of English ethnicity over the last couple of decades as a normal identity is to be welcomed not feared, flags and all.

And post-liberals are right to stress the enduring importance of both ethnic and broader national identities. In more fragmented societies a critical mass of the population sharing a strong fellow-citizen attachment, regardless of race or ethnicity, is essential to navigating future collective action problems.

Too many liberals deepen this fragmentation with confected outrage over common sense beliefs such as the fact that even people with British passports can be more and less British or English depending on length of time in the country, language, habits, and so on. It is also a failure of empathy and imagination not to recognise that people can feel discomfort about ethnic change without being racist.

In any case, no political party will get elected in modern Britain without accepting, at least in broad outline, both of the post-war social revolutions: the welfare revolution of the 1940s and 1950s and the race and sex equality revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

It is also true, on the conservative side of the ledger, that a big reason for post-liberalism’s appeal is widespread regret at the loss of community and national solidarity, and the accompanying sharp 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, disproportionately in the bottom half of the income spectrum. 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 moderns have been happy, in Yuval Noah Harari’s memorable 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 main problem—rather than the recent marriage of economic neo-liberalism and progressivism—opens the door to the reactionary post-liberals 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 more moderate post-liberal 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 argument in his recent book Centrists of the World Unite! He frames his argument as a re-invention of liberalism but it’s one that overlaps substantially with the kind of post-liberalism advocated here: a decidedly un-centrist challenge to the bourgeois-bohemian economic and moral de-regulation of the past 40 years.

One way of thinking about post-liberalism as a course correction is seeing it as a political force that seeks to reinvigorate some of the background factors that helped liberalism to work better in earlier decades. Tyler Cowen has defined the liberalism of the relatively stable post-war era as: “A blend of a capitalist mixed economy, largely democratic institutions and a fair but not complete degree of value neutrality across competing lifestyles.”

Post-liberalism cannot mean a return to the 1950s and any version that promotes it will fail. But it is one of post-liberalism’s most effective criticisms of liberalism that it is parasitic on other forces to function properly. Freedom and value neutrality work best in a context of individual restraint, broadly shared norms and demographic stability.

Post-1945 liberalism in the West certainly benefitted from many underlying factors that are now either absent or weakened: a young, growing population; rapidly rising incomes for most people; 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 recent experience of war) creating a strong “imagined community” and common norms across social classes.

Today, by contrast, we live in low-growth, ageing societies, with an archipelago of competing value and interest groups consuming individualised media, with weakened families and national attachments, and with faith in our political class badly dented. Liberalism is under strain and needs a helping hand from post-liberal priorities, (even if the term itself remains too obscure for mainstream political debate).

My own version, that I would categorise as belonging to the Left-conservative school of post-liberalism—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 liberal Left, (promoted in some aspects of international law).
• 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.
• Money alone is not the answer to poverty and social dysfunction, family structure/upbringing matter.
• More support for stable families, marriage and higher fertility by minimising 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 business preference in public procurement.
• Tougher paternalistic regulation of industries with power to poison bodies (food) and minds (tech).
• Less market in some key public utilities but more market in areas where competition is weak.
• Transition to Dutch-style social insurance model for health and social care.
• An end to this version of net-zero, and lowest possible energy costs for businesses and households.
• Limited use of subsidies and tariffs to prioritise national industry, reshoring and innovation, and national control over critical infrastructure/utilities.
• Incentivisation of a more patriotic business elite, and clearer distinction in the tax system between the productive and unproductive rich (a land tax?).
• Reduction in the tax/regulatory burden on small business.
• Promoting higher levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship, especially among young people.

3. A regional settlement to tackle the crisis of demoralisation in Somewhere Britain.

• Tackle extreme regional divides by promoting not just public investment and growth companies in left-behind places but investing in grass-roots institutions: sports clubs, youth clubs, pubs.
• We need our elite universities but must 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 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 almost exclusively on higher welfare payments; the persistent belief that more graduates is good for the economy and society; reluctance to re-think rights legislation or international conventions even when they thwart democratic common sense.

There are policies here borrowed from Right and Left traditions but the Right bloc in British politics would be most comfortable with it. To turn the cultural dominance of the Right bloc into political power requires, as well as some kind of accommodation between Reform and the Conservatives at the next election, 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, and perhaps unavoidably, true of the insurgent Reform. As Nigel Farage tacks to the centre, 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 is able to combine some of the productive, de-regulatory 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.

One of post-liberalism’s favourite themes (shared by Wooldridge) is the need for a better elite. Britain certainly needs a new generation of politicians who can speak across that Anywhere-Somewhere divide, and maybe a Prime Minister who can capture the new national mood in the way that Tony Blair briefly managed. We do not want to replace an Anywhere hegemony with a Somewhere one, even in the era of provincial insecurity.

The Anywhere worldview, comfortable with social and demographic change, was once the ideology of the confident, meritocratic professional and managerial class, designed for the new age of metropolitan openness, with its challenge to old hierarchies at the end of the 20^th century. But it curdled into a self-interested professional class reflex that imposed itself on a Somewhere majority who have identities based more around place and group than academic achievement and are, therefore, more discomforted by rapid change.

Both worldviews are needed in our complex societies and they are less binary than they sometimes seem. We saw in the pandemic that there was overwhelming support for draconian restrictions on liberty for what was perceived to be the common good. Most people place a very high value on security and familiarity. But in a different context the same is true about individual freedom and autonomy.

It is part of the post-liberal critique of modern liberalism that it promotes a shallow understanding of freedom: an idea of freedom as lack of constraint on our individual desires and projects of self-actualisation (that saw its apotheosis in the Epstein files).

Whether that is true of liberalism it is certainly true of the human condition that we often prioritise short-term desires over our longer-term best interests. Most of us would welcome institutions and cultural norms that nudge us to make better choices but woe betide anyone who thinks they know our own best interests better than we do.

Liberalism, as Wooldridge points out, has had several course corrections in its long history. The late 19^th/early 20^th century course correction, 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 dramatic from liberalism than accepting a new balance between the dispersal of power and the need for effective democratic governance. Even the raffishly liberal Financial Times commentator, Janan Ganesh, has recognised that liberal democracy needs to be a bit less liberal and a bit more democratic.

One aspect of traditional liberalism that we should all cling to is a sensibility more than an idea or institution: reasonableness, open-mindedness, not seeing opponents as enemies, good faith argument, ability to change when the facts change, and so on.

This sensibility can no longer be taken for granted and some variants of post-liberalism that I described earlier have contributed to that. But this is a problem that afflicts all political traditions, exacerbated by identity politics on the Left and ethno-nationalism on the Right.

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

It is therefore all the more important that The Rest is Politics centrists learn to accept the new more cultural terrain of politics and the legitimacy of populist parties like Reform that eschew racism and ethno-nationalism. Rather than demonising opponents as bigots or elitists from our respective trenches we need a more expansive and representative centre ground that can accommodate both liberals and ‘decent populists’.

After the relative calm of the second half of the 20^th century, at least in most of the West, huge challenges are now piling up while the political ability to manage them is confronted by democratic electorates more demanding and divided than ever, hence our revolving door of Prime Ministers.

And if some strands of post-liberalism are part of the problem, the broader intuitions of the movement are a necessary part of the solution.

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Why not join us for an interactive Radix Big Tent 'Meet the Leaders' webinar with David Goodhart, journalist, think tanker and now author of The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality and Vicky Pryce, Chair of Radix Big Tent at 6.00pm on Wednesday 26th June.

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This blog was first published on A Goodhart is Hard to Find.

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