But this move is different in two key ways. First, the rationale appears to not be economic, but rather a revealingly expansive interpretation of national security. Second, by using American dominance in high-end semiconductors as a tool of economic coercion, it puts a key technology monopoly into strategic play, a move that carries serious long-term implications for the United States.

The public aims for the trade war, from the American side, are framed in terms of decreasing the trade deficit and reviving American manufacturing. The pledges being floated as part of a trade deal make sense in these terms—tariffs and pledges to buy American products to reduce the trade imbalance and renegotiating joint ventures to slow the transfer of intellectual property, in order to undermine China’s ability to compete in high-value-added manufacturing. Banning chip exports, however, accomplishes neither of these goals. It cuts into American chip manufacturers’ sales, potentially at the expense of their Korean or Taiwanese counterparts. And it targets a single company with limited U.S. sales, notably bypassing other Chinese smartphone makers, such as Oppo, Xiaomi, and Vivo, each of which are closing in on Apple’s share of the global smartphone market.

If economics is not the rationale, national security is a more likely candidate, centering around Huawei as a leading manufacturer of 5G network infrastructure. Years after the Snowden revelations, it’s common knowledge that major technology companies are political captives to their national governments. From that perspective, it’s no surprise that the U.S. may wish to exclude foreign-manufactured network equipment as a security risk. What is a surprise, however, is that the national security state has been able to override traditional, dominant free market ideology, which routinely trades off state interests of sovereignty for the economic interests of private companies.

There are likely a couple of reasons for this new switch. First, it was easier to favor the interests of U.S. private companies in the past because few states had the ability to seriously project political power into the U.S. via nominally (though not actually) private companies. But that’s changed both in reality and perception. Second, the national security state threat model of—and subsequent actions against—Huawei is likely a byproduct of intense attentional focus on Russian intervention in the U.S. 2016 presidential election, which led to broader focus on foreign actors. Third, the Trump administration has explicitly embraced state logic over economic logic.

Trading off whiteboard economic efficiency for state sovereignty is no longer a thought experiment.

But for this narrow goal, a chip export ban is overkill—the same goal could have been achieved by simply banning Huawei networking equipment from use in national infrastructure. Further, in the run-up to the ban, American lobbying was also able to prevent Huawei network equipment from entering countries in the closely allied Five Eyes intelligence sharing group. Notably, however, such lobbying was unsuccessful on the European continent; Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland all refused to exclude Huawei from bidding on infrastructure projects. Together with deals in Asia and Africa, Huawei seemed poised to acquire a leading position in global market share for 5G, with the exception of America and core allies. But following the ban, with Huawei struggling to stay viable as it tries to find an alternative to American chips, it will be difficult for the company to make credible commitments to service European networks in the long-term. Such bids will more likely fall to companies such as Ericsson and Nokia, headquartered in countries that fall more within Washington’s orbit.

Thus, the chip ban likely came following the realization that American lobbying was failing to retain control of decision-making in EU countries. Far from being a routine bargaining chip in the ongoing trade war, the ban represents a vital national interest in maintaining control not only of the network infrastructure of the U.S. and its key intelligence-sharing allies, but more broadly in its sphere of influence.

On the one hand, this move demonstrates the coercive potential that America still retains in its control of the high-technology supply chain. Even as hardware manufacturing has left Silicon Valley, America and its allies retain monopolies over key, capital-intensive industries such as high-end semiconductor manufacturing, as well as inputs such as design software and architecture licenses. Centrality in technological networks operates the same way—although many countries have the technical skill to produce novel operating systems, for example, it is quite a different matter to replicate the stack of optimized hardware and the ecosystem of software published for that OS. Powers wishing to retain autonomy not only need to maintain the military prerequisites for sovereignty, but also a level of technological autarky that is staggeringly expensive, even for a near-peer rival.

But using this monopoly to cripple a national champion has significant long-term costs. America with its semiconductor monopoly is analogous to OPEC in the 1973 oil crisis: able to leverage a dominant market position for short-term geopolitical goals, but only at the expense of galvanizing the target country towards developing self-sufficiency. Now that China has received the sharpest possible reminder of its vulnerability, it will inevitably accelerate its drive towards domestic chip manufacture, through the same sort of industrial policy that has allowed Samsung and TSMC to become technological leaders.

Developing the semiconductor industry has always been a talking point in the past, with “new information technology” as one of the ten target industries of the Made in China 2025 initiative. But bold-sounding initiatives have not always translated to policy; there are signs that the Belt and Road initiative, for example, has been significantly hijacked by state-owned enterprises and provincial governments working off incentives at cross-purposes to its underlying geopolitics.

But this is no longer a contest over infrastructure pork; it’s an attack by a geopolitical rival on a national champion, revealing a vulnerability in innumerable domestic companies. This is the sort of concrete threat that allows greater political consensus than would otherwise be possible. And this consensus is needed—self-sufficiency in semiconductors requires investment in the tens of billions of dollars and likely difficult, loss-making purchase agreements by domestic companies along the way. If semiconductor self-sufficiency was political boilerplate before, it’s a strategic imperative now, and there is no indication that China will be unable to follow where other East Asian tigers have already blazed the trail.

Now that Moore’s law has decelerated, with nanometer sizes largely reflecting incremental improvements and marketing spin, this is perhaps the best time to undertake the effort. If accomplished, this will leave the world with two substantially independent semiconductor supply chains, not only eroding American market share but limiting its ability to freeze out other states without Chinese cooperation.

The Huawei chip ban, then, is best seen as an escalation in response to the failure of previous American lobbying to prevent the Chinese company from becoming part of the infrastructure for European countries. This strategic imperative is itself revealing—the benefit American domination of 5G hardware gives to espionage and counter-espionage in Europe is considered worth potentially trading away a comfortable monopoly in cutting-edge semiconductors.

Almost regardless of the outcome of future trade negotiations, the die has now been cast; Huawei will likely be hamstrung in the 5G race for several years, by which time it’s hoped that the first wave of 5G infrastructure will have already been deployed by American-aligned companies. Meanwhile, China has received the strongest possible impetus to accelerate its drive to become independent in the manufacture of semiconductors.

It is another small step towards a world in which China and other post-liberal states create parallel financial, diplomatic, and technological institutions, one in which neither country will hold the same level of coercive potential that the United States now enjoys.

But this small step is novel in its own right, going against considerable ideological inertia and economic interests. For example, post-war economic thinking has mostly ignored issues of sovereignty when discussing trade and industrial policy. Further, substantial powerful capital interests stand to lose from this transition. This is not just business as usual, following existing bureaucratic procedures and incentives.

The ban is thus a sign of life from the state; we can infer the existence of some competent strategic players acting at least nominally in the direct interest of the state as such. Importantly, we can infer that such statesmen are, at least in some cases and in the face of real issues of state interest, not substantially impaired by either existing ideological constraints of post-war liberalism, or the interests of capital.

To be really sure of anything, we would need to see a consistent pattern of novel action, and trace it to the specific responsible players in the Trump administration, intelligence community, or elsewhere. But even with this single example, we can take note and perk up our ears for more signs of the post-liberal future: the times, they are changing, and the old rules increasingly do not apply.

The theme this year was “Globalization 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” It was preceded by a more forthright than expected piece from WEF founder and German economist Klaus Schwab in Foreign Affairs, which both recognizes the populist surge across the world and concedes that it may have some legitimate points. Only one in five people believe that the system is working for them. Clearly something is happening. Compared to last year, where only 5 percent of CEOs believed that growth would slow down, this year the number surged to 30 percent. With dulled optimism and the noted absence of major world leaders, the atmosphere at Davos was somewhat depressed and disoriented. Xi, Trudeau, Macron, May, and Trump were all too consumed with domestic politics to bother. What this meant in practice for this year’s Forum was fewer traffic delays.

Davos has at least two tiers. There’s the inner party of world leaders, top CEOs, and other global VIPs, which is the WEF itself, and then there’s the outer party of everyone else. The white badges, and the hotel badges. It’s like TED vs. TEDx. One is the prestige generator; the other gains by association. Some overlap of white badges and hotel badges exists at the individual level, but there’s no substantial cross-over at the group level. The white badges keep themselves segregated from the hotel badges, who are all-too-aware of their separate group identity.

Following an uneventful flight into Zurich on Sunday, I promptly took a three hour train to my hotel at one of the comfortable 400-person villages in the vicinity of Davos—which itself has a much larger population of about 11,000, and where the architecture projects a more modern atmosphere. This makes sense. The seasonal population swells of the WEF means that there is a huge demand for building space—so much so that most businesses on the main Davos promenade vacate the premises entirely and lease out their venues at exorbitant rates. For the most prominent companies, the expense doesn’t amount to much at all, but it does amount to a significant portion of local business revenue for the entire year.

When the WEF is not in swing, Davos is largely like any other quiet Alpine ski town.

But immaculate Swiss urban planning is not the first thing you notice upon arrival at the WEF. After spilling out of the train and onto the Davos promenade, you encounter Swiss police officers carrying MP5 submachine guns, and snipers in snow camouflage dotting the rooftops. The police are everywhere, and they want you to know it. On the street. At the entrances to the hotels. In blue uniforms. In plain clothes. In a variety of police vehicles. Walking in packs. But they were exceedingly polite. Even when pulling your driver over, holding you for about 15 minutes, checking all your documents, re-checking all your documents, and sending you on your way. The only time I ever heard a Swiss police officer raise his voice was when an older woman flagged a completely see-through van full of uniformed police with the word POLICE emblazoned on the side in white to ask, “Is this the shuttle?”

“NO, THIS IS THE POLICE.”

“Ah, furchtbar.”

Most of the main events in hotels are fully secured with cordoned off access, metal detectors, baggage scanners, and ID checks to keep out the badgeless peasantry who essentially have access to a few open houses and not much else (at least half of the people on the Davos Platz promenade are badgeless). Every time you enter the main hotels, you have to go through the airport experience all over again. But security were immaculately professional. They wore well-fitting suits and were polite. Only once during the week was I pulled to the side and asked to remove what they thought was a nail from my bag. It was a pen.

The promenade, a long strip winding through Davos, is where many of the main hotels, events, and corporate spaces are located, with a strong showing from consulting firms and tech companies: Palantir, Facebook, Cloudflare, etc., but also government houses (Ukraine House, Russia House, Caspian Week, etc.) and social causes like the Female Quotient (FQ) lounge, where most of the talks about diversity and equality took place. Blockchain companies also had a presence in various spaces like the Ethereal Lounge and BlockBase. The latter describes itself as “a central nexus and collaborative space for global change-makers to engage in advancing a holistic understanding of blockchain’s global impact in culture & society,” which is about as vaporware as the tech itself. To the credit of the blockchain space, one panelist actually admitted that most of those projects are a “technology looking for a market.” AI featured strongly alongside blockchain, as did the occasional cannabis event and accompanying sleazy marketer trying to bribe attendance through free samples.

If I could ask Schwab a single question, it would be this: if you knew in 1971 that the WEF would eventually be occupied by hordes of low-rent blockchain grifters, would you just fold up the whole thing? The blockchain community, though it contains a few interesting projects, is dominated by obvious scams, and so received an appropriate amount of contempt from traditional finance at Davos, whose scams are much more subtle and institutionalized.

There’s a temptation to assume that there is some sort of intrinsic relationship between all these pavilions, corporations, or various equality causes—that the collection of talks and events somehow represents a coherent global agenda, but it seems much more anarchic than that.

The Davos community consists of groups and causes that have muscled their way, through connections, power, money, or other means, into getting themselves invited to the Forum. In that sense, the Forum seems to be a microcosm of agenda-making itself. The agenda set at Davos seems to be comprised of many distinct issues, which are ultimately on the list because they came out on top in the blood-sport of global politics. Why is intersectionality on the list, while asteroid defense is not? Simple: the intersectionalists won.

Outside observers too often write off Davos attendees as starry-eyed, naïve dupes who merely exist to put a bow on global capital and growing inequality. There are a few of those. But there are other reasons for wanting to attend Davos, and these reasons come into play far more often:

1. It’s a good time to catch up with friends. Most of the attendees have full schedules. They’re at the top of their game, whether in the corporate, non-profit, or government worlds. Most of their close friends tend to share the same high-intensity, obsessive personality traits, partly because like attracts like and partly because these traits are prerequisites to climbing up the power ladder and thus moving in the same social circles. So, trying to coordinate schedules to spend personal time with friends is difficult, if not impossible. Davos is the coordinating point. At Davos, I ran into one of my best friends from Vancouver, who I haven’t seen in years—among others.
2. It’s close to the Peak Event for young professional grinders who want that extra line on their resume and accompanying status boost. Rise and grind, kings. Many are ambivalent about the whole compassion and help the world thing, but will mouth the words if they feel it will increase their chances at belonging in elite social circles. Imagine 20-something consultants from Deloitte, etc. bragging about flying business class and competing over who can get away with expensing the most purchases. That group was well-represented at Davos.
3. Companies and individuals have the chance to broadcast their new products and vision to influencers and also quickly rack up dozens of meetings over the course of a few days that would otherwise take years to coordinate. That’s mostly what Davos is. A business forum.
4. Governments are able to interface with other governments in person. Always valuable.

On one of the days, I sat in for at least four back-to-back talks and panels at the Female Quotient lounge—the designated space for many of the intersectionality events. “The Power of Heart Intelligence” featured a middle-aged Asian woman who referred to herself as “Mother Ocean” and was tearfully introduced by one of her acolytes as a real spiritual force. Mother Ocean proceeded to adopt a particular vocal tonality and rhythm commonly associated with hypnosis practice. Her PowerPoint presentation consisted of various self-defined attributes around the concept ‘love.’ For Mother Ocean, it’s important to “flush away all cynicism for love to fill you,” since “love is not partial, it is total.” I interpreted her use of love as the control concept which she uses in her spiritual practice to extract compliance. This is a common technique among charismatic leaders.

As is the case with many successful spiritual leaders, the tendency is to foresee which rival belief systems could come into conflict with the spiritual framework. The leader then tries to reconcile or build common ground with these systems, thereby providing a space for belief without angst. Usually, the most important element to grapple with and/or integrate is science, which is why many spiritual leaders will both attempt some integration of scientific concepts, while also dethroning the epistemological import of science in the spiritual domain. Sure enough, Mother Ocean did both. Although she briefly made gestures at scientific concepts, she relied on the following word-for-word instruction to do the heavy lifting: “Please don’t listen to this with your intellect because your intellect vibrates too slowly for this exquisite material.”

After the talk concluded and Beyonce’s Beautiful Liar started blaring from the speakers, Mother Ocean invited everyone upstairs to participate in crystal ball readings. While I was excited to learn more, my schedule unfortunately prevented me from attending.

That this talk was met with heartfelt nods says something important about the quality of Davos attendees. Davos is not the place where original thought is developed. Nor is it a place of rigorous analysis. Rather, it is an ideological synchronization environment for individuals, corporations, and governments to keep on the same page and to advance whatever agenda most loudly makes itself apparent. Much of this agenda revolves around U.N. Sustainable Development Goals; other projects are relevant insofar as they fit within that framework.

There were two other panels that caught my attention as possible signals of upcoming policy directions across the world.

The first featured a representative from the UN Global Pulse, a project that has the stated goal of responsibly harnessing big data for good. From what I gathered, the UN seems very interested in partnering with corporations who have large stores of consumer data that might be useful in achieving objectives other than generating profit. For example, the insurance industry has a wealth of data on medical conditions in American households. Might that data be useful for firefighters in determining which houses should be evacuated first?

The UN official was quick to add that privacy is, of course, an important concern, but what if the firefighters weren’t told any specifics? All they would know is that some households would be color-coded—maybe red for urgent evacuation. “I think we need to disrupt the whole conversation on privacy,” the official added. Given the importance of the firefighter example, he continued, it makes sense to believe that people have a right for us to use their data. The official recounted that he had once used the firefighter example in a meeting with industry executives, who were apparently flabbergasted that the firefighters weren’t already using this kind of data.

Mass surveillance in the service of philanthropic state objectives is certainly an interesting framing, as is the use of rights language. I never had the chance to ask the official whether people would be able to opt-out of making use of this new right.

The second panel was on the use of data in the context of improving health outcomes, and came with plenty of examples of what data can tell us about health outcomes. First, two-thirds of Golden Retrievers die from cancer, usually lymphoma. Second, according to the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic London, “The best predictor of diabetes is how often you buy fried chicken.” To that, a Chinese man in the finance industry at my table mumbled, “Well, it’s important to think of the causality here.”

The questions at this panel largely revolved around the consequences of what happens when insurance providers make decisions about premiums based on genomic data. The consensus seemed to be that no one should be penalized for their genome. Rather, they should be penalized for their behavior. In other words, you might have a genetic predisposition to obesity, but you should only be penalized if you actually stuff your face and expand your waistline. You can’t control your genome, but you can control your behavior, so the argument goes. Of course, this opens up debates about how agency itself might be predicted from genetic data—while this was not discussed at the panel, it’s a safe bet that it will be an important question.

The other panels I attended are not worth mentioning. They were unremarkable. But that’s true of panels, generally. Panels are largely useless. I’ve almost never learned anything interesting from a panel. The champagne was good, though. And of course, the best use of these panels is actually the networking after they’ve concluded, which is where you theoretically have the opportunity to meet interesting people.

But when talking to many attendees, I had the distinct impression that I was talking to overgrown student government representatives, who make an appearance at every model UN in an effort to résumé stack. “How about those Sustainable Development Goals, huh?”

Whatever the reality of this networking, the fact remains that Davos is increasingly seen around the world as the annual retreat of a detached global elite. As populism has risen, and particularly after the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, the conference has devoted more and more intellectual space to attempting a response to these electoral upheavals.

This trend was strongly felt at the 2019 conference, especially as democratic socialism has become substantially more prominent in the Western world. There is a tendency to lambaste Davos attendees as being utterly detached from rising global inequality in a diamond-encrusted cocoon. While it’s true that many are detached, they react in a much more sanguine manner to radical aims than some commentators might think. There’s a great NowThis video that’s been circulating around from the Forum of first-time attendee and historian Rutger Bregman explicitly calling out the use of ‘saving the planet’ rhetoric, even as elites attend Davos in private jets, and noting how philanthropy is just masking the real problem, namely that elites aren’t paying their fair share of taxes. Oxfam called for more taxes, too.

The Davos audience loudly applauded. This is actually quite typical and unsurprising. One characteristic of Davos attendees is that they love being called out in a safe and defanged manner, and they love safe and defanged activism. It’s a comfortable dialectic. I could only imagine myself in Bregman’s shoes, experiencing deep existential horror at the realization that his attempt at controversy was in fact loudly celebrated by attendees and blared from top media outlets under the ‘profiles in courage’ section.

As another example of this dynamic, sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg camped out in -18 °C weather, rather than staying in a hotel. She spoke on a panel alongside Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Bono, Jane Goodall, and will.i.am, where she called out members of the audience as being directly responsible for contributing to climate change.

Here, too, the reaction was not of genuine fear regarding a substantial threat to existing power structures. Instead, the response was, “Oh, how sweet and lovely that she cares. Yes, of course we must remember to save the Earth.”

This is what activism looks like when it’s highly normalized, defanged, and incorporated into the power structure’s mode of being. It is not a direct challenge to power from a wholly oppositional force, but rather an acceleration of shared pieties. A couple of CEOs complained about proposals for high marginal tax rates, and elsewhere a separate audience laughed at the idea of rates as high as 70%, but these seemed to be disagreements about means, not ends. The dangers of rising inequality have become clear to nearly all involved. Besides, self-preservation is one of the primary activities of power.

Whether those participating are conscious of it or not, this praise is a key part of recuperation: the process of co-opting potentially threatening radical movements and discourses. This has been long-standing practice throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. In our walks through Davos, panels and exhibits on everything from women’s issues to ecological crisis to cryptocurrency testified to the successful pacification of groups and causes once thought irreconcilable with elite power. Political energy directed against the ruling class weakens as some proportion of the radical movement defects in exchange for personal and ideological advancement.

It’s not irrational from the movement’s perspective, either: after all, it’s a realistic shot at achieving at least part of whatever the goal is, plus you get access to a much higher quality network of people than alienated street activists. The defection ultimately helps to renew the legitimacy of the political governing class as a whole. It takes real revolutionary discipline to stop this kind of defection if the goal is larger systemic change.

On the other hand, Swiss police clashed with masked protesters 170 miles west of Davos in Bern, who “threw firecrackers and missiles.” No real damage resulted. About 100 protesters were charged for their efforts. It’s clear that this protest accomplished precisely nothing, except perhaps for generating internal status in the protest social scene, which is well-connected in Switzerland and also more broadly in Europe. Even though this protest was obviously ineffectual, at least it was slightly less kept. I can’t quite picture Benioff making an appearance, patting these cute kids on the head, and sending them back to bed with a glass of water—like with Thunberg.

The average age at Davos is 54 for men and 49 for women. Nowhere was this better reflected than at Hotel Europe’s Piano Bar on the closing night of the Forum. At around midnight, the second-floor bar filled up well beyond fire regulation capacity, and the effects of the open bar made themselves felt—as they had the previous night when two men were having sex in the bathroom, and security had to bring out the pepper spray for another incident. Other venues were in constant fear of fines due to being over-capacity, but as far as I could tell, Piano Bar was left unmolested. Had there actually been a fire, the resulting stampede would’ve rivaled the quadrennial Hajj stampede, if not for the Swiss authorities’ competence compared to the Saudis.

At around 3 a.m., the Baby Boomers were sloshed, spilling booze on each other and the floor, putting cigarettes out in the carpet, and painfully singing in call and response to Billy Joel-esque music from the live band. When waiters or waitresses would pass by with trays of wine glasses, people would refuse to move out of the way, jostling the serving staff instead.

“Yeah, fuck you,” one of the waitresses screamed after she was knocked around, causing close to a dozen wine glasses to smash on the ground.

A few minutes passed and hotel staff appeared.

“Who did this?” one of them asked.

“I did,” I said. Why not?

“My man,” the manager congratulated.

Party on, my dudes.

Security would periodically drag someone out of the hotel to vain screams of “don’t touch me, don’t touch me.” Apparently, not letting everyone into private parties is deeply undemocratic, or something. I took several pictures of this process for posterity, before security noticed and stood directly in front of my camera.

The night continued until about 5 a.m., when I dragged myself across the unsalted, icy sidewalks of Davos in -16 °C weather and crashed with a group of hospitable Russians.

There are a lot of journalists who are unreasonably menaced by Davos and so channel sour grapes. It’s hardly boring. The private parties are very good, but journalists are kept out partly because they’re often one-timers, partly because they’re not all that socially skilled, and partly because not many people want spies roaming around their parties looking for lurid details.

So, what ties it all together? Not much. The hotel badge scene suffers from a lack of group consciousness. There is no community, but rather a bunch of individuals and tribes drinking from the prestige fountain and trying to promote their particular cause to the forefront of the global agenda. If there’s any real community, it forms around ethnicity. The Chinese stick with the Chinese, the Africans with the Africans, and the Russians with the Russians. The Ukrainians just want everyone to like them.

The hotel badge scene is emphatically not where the real action happens. It’s a simulacrum of the white badge scene. The real action happens in the Congress Center, in meetings, at private parties, and when friends connect. But for those outside Switzerland, Davos is Davos; attendance in any capacity is about the same level of prestige, so what does it matter? What happens in the hotel badge scene is largely irrelevant, so it doesn’t need to be tightly controlled. This is why the scene is dominated (though not exclusively) by model UN striver types, who excel at grinding away in consulting, finance, PR, NGOs, etc., but otherwise have little interesting to say. Play your cards right, and you might find yourself among the white badges some day in the future.

The great thing about Davos is that it has more prestige than a Washington, D.C. trade show. After that, attendance is what you make of it. Most of the panels lack insight, but walk into the right party and it’s possible to encounter real talent.

I had a great time and would attend again.

The basic thesis is that liberal democratic states tend not to go to war with one another, because of the structural and/or normative features of liberal democratic states. That is, liberalism as such is directly responsible for the miraculous track record of peace that we’ve seen post-World War II, especially in Europe and North America.

In the post-World War II environment and doubly so in the post-Cold War environment, more and more of the world was moving towards liberal democracy. This was cause for excitement; world peace was on the horizon. The Soviet Union had fallen, dictatorships were collapsing, and the number of democracies was skyrocketing. Noted historian Spencer Weart boldly claimed that a “preponderance of democracies will transform the entire system of international relations.”

The arc of history was bending in the direction of liberalism and towards the democratic peace.

But something happened in the early 2000s. The unfolding of history as liberalism had been disrupted. The attacks of September 11, the subsequent bungling of intelligence regarding WMDs, the United States’ decision to drag its NATO allies into a series of embarrassing and ultimately ineffectual wars in the Middle East, numerous botched attempts at regime change and nation-building, and aggressive ideological demands as pre-conditions for diplomacy, have devastated the credibility of the U.S.-driven, Western liberal order. In some areas, history is now forking from the liberal path with a surprising confidence.

Axios declared 2018 the year of the strongman, but it can also be called the year of liberalism in crisis. Russia, Egypt, China, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey—among others—have gained a renewed sense of self and conviction in their opposition to liberalism, as opposed to merely carving out for themselves an unprincipled exception to liberalism and ceding it the moral high ground. Even in Europe, where liberal democracy claims some of its greatest accomplishments, liberalism is beginning to unravel on the periphery in countries like Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Jair Bolsonaro, who notably expressed sympathy for a military dictatorship, has done tremendously well so far in the Brazilian presidential election.

Neither soft, nor hard evangelism of liberalism is working the way it used to.

For liberal theorists, the prospect of a liberal democratic world peace is now questionable. The Economist has put out a call to arms to defend liberalism as the most successful idea of the last 400 years. Whether this call results in anything substantial remains to be seen. But there is a palpable sense that liberalism is facing a serious new opposition.

Despite this trend, liberalism’s theorists have a hope encapsulated by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry’s 2009 pronouncement that “liberal states should not assume that history has ended, but they can still be certain that it is on their side.”

And yet, in the nine years following this bold pronouncement, history has not been especially kind to liberalism.

Texas A&M political science professor Christopher Layne, writing in early 2018, has summed up the current situation aptly, namely that China as an increasingly self-aware superpower is already reshaping the world order away from Pax Americana:

The US foreign policy establishment does not grasp this, and, instead, has invested the idea of a ‘rules-based, institutionalized’ international order with a talismanic quality. It claims that rules and institutions are politically neutral, and, ipso facto, beneficial for all. However, in international politics, who rules makes the rules. Rules and institutions reflect the distribution of power in the international system. A power transition is taking place in the early twenty-first century: US power is in relative decline and China is rising quickly. No international order—not even the Pax Americana—lasts forever. The liberal world order cannot survive the erosion of US hegemonic power. It is this structural change, not Donald Trump, that threatens the post-Second World War international order’s survival. It requires a huge leap of faith to believe that a risen China will continue to subordinate itself to the Pax Americana.

Which brings us to the question: given that the prospect of an expanded democratic peace is starting to hit some hard limits, how well does liberal democratic peace theory actually explain the peace that has existed among liberal democratic states?

Although LDP theory is taken as an empirical law in international relations, it has picked up a number of qualifications, making the theory far less interesting than first presented. Here are various renditions of the theory since its modern inception in the 1960s:

Claim 1: liberal democracies go to war less than non-liberal democracies.

The most significant abandonment in the field has been of the monadic hypothesis: that liberal democratic states are less likely to go to war compared to non-liberal democratic states. Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa have convincingly shown that, statistically, democracies on average have the same probability of going to war as non-democracies. At this point, no one holds the monadic hypothesis.

Claim 2: no liberal democracy has fought another liberal democracy since 1816 (notably after 1812)

This claim from Michael Doyle has increasingly fallen out of favor. There weren’t many democracies prior to 1945, and so the number of dyadic pairs of liberal democratic countries that could have gone to war was extremely limited. For example, Doyle excludes Great Britain from counting as a liberal democracy until 1832 and denies that the Spanish-American War of 1898 should count, even though the Polity II data set lists Spain as a democracy in 1898. Others have argued that the Second Philippines War of 1899 shouldn’t count either, as at the time the Philippines hadn’t held an election yet. This strong claim has largely been dropped because of a) exception cases that require new qualifications to explain, and b) the fact that there weren’t enough existing liberal democracies to achieve significance. All totaled, there are around 50 exception cases suggested in the literature.

Claim 3: mature liberal democracies tend not to go to war/don’t go to war with one another

Although Peru and Ecuador fought while both were liberal democracies, some maintain that the war occurred before the “pacifying effects” of liberal democracy had enough time to work, meaning maturity was lacking. Yet another qualification. Interestingly, the U.S. intervened militarily to topple Salvador Allende after he was democratically elected in Chile. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1981, but at the time, Lebanon’s government was in disarray. R.J. Rummel states that the Israeli attack on the United States’ USS Liberty in 1967 counts as conflict below the level of war, but argued that Israel at the time was “only partially free.” That Finland joined up with the fascists from 1941 to 1944 apparently shouldn’t count, as no Finnish troops attacked troops from a liberal democratic country, though Great Britain bombed Finland in 1941.

Claim 4: mature liberal democracies in the post-1945 era don’t go to war with one another

The addition of the ‘post-1945 era’ qualification came later in the development of LDP theory, and while it may be a disappointing qualification, it may be necessary, given the small-N universe of liberal democracies before 1945. Bruce Russett admits that “the absence of murderous quarrels between democracies was not too surprising, and may need—at least for the pre-1945 era—little further explanation.”

Claim 5: mature liberal democracies in the post-1945 era don’t go to war with one another, but for normative reasons, not structural reasons

It’s claimed that the structural elements of liberal democratic states, namely separation of powers, checks and balances, elections, the free press, etc. should result in less war in general, but this is essentially equivalent to the monadic hypothesis, which has been largely abandoned. So, it might be possible to explain the absence of war through the normative mechanisms of liberal democratic states, as opposed to structural elements. Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett argue that while there is some support for the structural model, the normative model has more support and better consistency.

The above examples illustrate continuing iterations of the theory. This trajectory is by no means perfectly linear, nor is there consensus on how many qualifications are required, but the fact that these qualifications have continued to pile on is evidence that LDP theory is now much closer to triviality than when first introduced.

But on some level, LDP seems intuitive, first because we’re naturally more amenable to arguments that uphold our traditions of liberalism, and second because both North America and Europe are now overwhelmingly comprised of liberal democratic states and have enjoyed a near-unparalleled level of peace and prosperity over the last 70 years.

While it is true that there is an empirical track record of peace and prosperity between liberal democratic states in Europe and North America, the absence of war does not automatically vindicate the theory. Zero is not necessarily statistically significant, since that result might simply be predicted by random chance, as is the case with lightning strikes. People are struck by lightning all the time, but none of my friends have ever been. In general, the statistical approach adopted by much of the literature is somewhat methodologically wrong-headed; it assumes statistical properties which don’t necessarily hold in fat-tailed structural processes like war.

Aside from issues of statistical significance, the objective is to scrutinize the causal mechanisms supporting LDP theory—a fundamental step of theory-building. While there are a host of mechanisms adopted to explain democratic peace, astonishingly little research has been conducted into whether these mechanisms of liberalism actually work to guarantee the peace.

Michael Doyle’s recent expression of LDP theory in the article “Three Pillars of the Liberal Peace” stands out as a careful explication of the causal logic underlying LDP theory.

For Doyle, there are three mechanisms at play, all of which must be in operation simultaneously to generate the peace. The first mechanism is that LD states are accountable to voters, especially the median voter. As such, these states “preclude monarchs or dictators turning their potentially aggressive interests into public policy while assuming that the costs will be borne by a subordinate public.”

The second mechanism is that liberal principles or norms entail respect for legitimate individual rights, which are externalized in foreign policy. As Doyle puts it, “Domestically just republics…presume foreign republics to be also consensual, just, and therefore deserving of the accommodation that the individuals that compose them deserve.” The free press in liberal democratic states also helps to hold officials accountable to liberal principles.

The third mechanism is that commerce between liberal democratic states binds them together in a way that strongly discourages war.

The first mechanism of accountability assumes that voters pay close attention to war, don’t like war, and can’t be manipulated into bearing the costs of war. These assumptions seem implausible when examining America’s track record over just the last two decades. Yemen, as just one example out of countless, probably does not even register as a country to the median voter. The U.S. is currently at war in at least seven different countries.

The first mechanism also assumes voters who are able to accurately assess the success or failure of policies, accurately assign responsibility for success or failure, and then electorally reward or punish elites. This concept is known as retrospective voting. In retrospective voting, voters cast ballots based on results, not policies. Outcomes, so it goes, function as a heuristic for voters to rely on to overcome policy ignorance and compel liberal to act beneficially.

But in a 2013 study, Bryan Caplan et al. determined that voters systematically overestimate the influence of politicians on the economy and systematically underestimate their influence on education and the federal budget. The prognosis for retrospective voting is grim: “As long as ignorant and irrational voters know enough to properly reward success and punish failure, democracy can still work well. Unfortunately, retrospective voting requires a largely undefended assumption: Voters’ beliefs about political influence are unbiased.” That is, voters overestimate, underestimate, and misallocate influence.

Numerous other studies have examined voters’ strange propensity to vote out incumbents based on bad circumstances out of incumbents’ control. One such study found that voters punished U.S. governors in oil-producing states based on fluctuating world oil prices. Another determined that the success or failure of incumbent politicians in Latin America was based on U.S. interest rates, in addition to international commodity prices. Voters also consistently punish incumbents for droughts and floods.

While the above work undermines retrospective voting in the abstract, Sebastian Rosato looked specifically at voter behavior in the context of lost wars and found that both liberal democratic and autocratic leaders have similar chances of being removed from power for losing wars, but not a single one of the liberal democratic leaders was actually punished. In contrast, 29 percent of autocratic leaders were either killed, imprisoned, or exiled. For wars that are costly, but not lost, that is, wars where there is one fatality per 2,000 population, autocrats were removed from power 35 percent of the time. They were also punished in 27 percent of cases. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, get off a lot easier, and were only removed 27 percent of the time and punished in just 7 percent of cases.

Such findings cast doubt on the first pillar for explaining the peace.

The second pillar focuses on the externalization of liberal democratic norms and principles to the international arena via media publicity and other avenues, which causes liberal democratic states to treat other liberal democratic states with trust and respect, even in cases where there are serious clashes of interests.

But norm externalization has not applied in crucial cases. In a 1994 paper, Christopher Layne used process-tracing to determine that liberal norms and principles did not explain any part of why near-miss wars did not occur between the United States and Britain in 1861, France and Great Britain in 1898, and France and Germany in 1923, as public opinion was not pacific and elites did not refrain from making threats, among other indicators.

Additionally, if liberal democratic norms operate internationally to prevent conflict, a fortiori they should operate domestically. But according to Håvard Hegre, once GDP per capita is controlled for, it turns out that democratic states are no less likely to suffer from internal conflict, compared to autocracies. The historical record also indicates that the U.S. aggressively intervened in democracies and subsequently installed autocratic regimes. Several recent and notable interventions were: Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1957, British Guyana in 1961, Brazil in 1961 and 1964, Chile in 1973, and Nicaragua in 1984.

Doyle’s response is two-fold: first, the democracies weren’t democratic enough or weren’t fully liberal democratic states, and second, these U.S. interventions were covert, meaning that elites subverted a crucial liberal democratic mechanism.

The first response could arguably apply to Iran, Indonesia, and Nicaragua, which at the time were quite immature democracies, but certainly the regimes at the time were more democratic than previous regimes. The other states, however, were much more democratic.

The second response about covert action misses the point. If the mechanisms to explain such an outcome do not work as described in even a small number of cases, so much the worse for the mechanisms. Appeal to covert action to save the mechanism is simply an admission of its limited explanatory power.

The third and final pillar concerns the claim of conflict-reducing interdependencies between nations caused by trade, but even if this is true—and the literature is mixed on this point—trade is not exclusive to liberalism. And the argument that free trade specifically is necessary for this mechanism to work is 1) putting an enormous amount of stock in the difference between “free” and “unfree” trade, and 2) missing the point that free trade may be best understood here as a proxy either for liberal democratic states in the same military alliance or for the relationship between a liberal democratic state and a small vassal state, in which no military conflict is necessary to achieve desired economic domination.

For Doyle, the underlying mechanisms must always be in play for LDP theory to work. But this position is dangerously close to a tautology, as the second mechanism holds that liberal democratic states’ liberal principles of respect, trust, and the recognition of legitimate individual rights are externalized in its foreign policy. What this effectively translates to is that it necessarily has to be the case that liberal democratic states treat other liberal democratic states with respect and trust for there to be a low likelihood of war, which is uninformative.

If the causal logic of these mechanisms is broken, or if there are numerous historical case studies in which these mechanisms actually do not prevent war or explain near-misses between liberal democratic states, then other candidate mechanisms should be explored to explain the democratic peace.

One way of trying to answer the question of what best explains the lack of war in Europe and North America is to imagine hypothetical scenarios from the perspective of elite decision-makers in a dyad and come up with plausible conditions under which war might emerge. What conditions would have to obtain in the current geopolitical environment for Germany to go to war with France, or England to go to war with France, or Germany to go to war with Greece, etc.?

Let’s start with the last hypothetical, although it will sound odd because war in Western Europe is almost inconceivable in the post-World War II environment.

But imagine we broaden the circle and German decision-makers become so incensed with Greece’s lack of fiscal continence that Germany decides to invade Greece.

First, Germany’s military is currently not capable of launching and sustaining a land or air war in Europe.

Second, both Germany and Greece belong to the same U.S.-engineered military alliance, NATO, and so other NATO member states would be obliged to defend Greece.

Third, in order to get to the point where the proposal of war in this instance would even be on the table, the German state would have to be filled with—and German voters would have to vote for—an entirely new elite dominated by an entirely new and aggressive way of thinking. The United States engineered the post-World War II environment specifically to ensure this does not occur, and continually maintains this environment with both hard and soft power—the former via its enduring military presence on the continent and the latter via diplomatic censure and its many U.S.-funded or coordinated non-governmental organizations.

Replace Greece in this example with France, and an additional point of consideration appears: France has nuclear weapons.

For any other conceivable dyad, many or most of these considerations will also apply, and none have any strong relationship with liberal principles or mechanisms, with the exception in this case of the liberal character of the German elite. However, this of course is due to the fact that a large part of Germany was a U.S. vassal state immediately after 1945 and still maintains much of that character as a militarily and diplomatically-occupied country.

It would be a mistake to think of foreign policy decision-makers as purely motivated by power, just like it would be a mistake to conceive of them as purely utility maximizers. Humans in general are motivated by a multiplicity of goods and possess a certain baseline level of sociability. But the claim is that the motivations of sociability for peace are downstream of identity relations, and identity relations in the post-1945 era emphatically were constructed as part of Pax Americana, the new, U.S.-led order.

Moreover, due to the way sovereignty is de facto distributed in the post-World War II environment, Germany is not quite the right unit for war and is part of an arguably post-national order. While Germany is technically considered to be a sovereign state, the idea of it practically exercising this sovereignty to invade Greece and get away with it is not very plausible. The long arm of the U.S., NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations would put a stop to such a move.

The more appropriate unit for war is more like NATO versus a rogue liberal democratic state or a rogue NATO member state—perhaps Turkey.

If NATO did in fact go to war against its member state Turkey, democratic peace theorists might claim that this is no way counts as a point against their thesis. After all, Turkey isn’t exactly a shining example of liberal democracy.

But what they’re missing is that regime character is downstream of power relations and historical processes. In the West, liberal democracy is the only game in town, and the extent to which other countries have adopted liberal democracy is a reliable indicator of the extent to which they have become integrated into the U.S.-dominated geopolitical order. The process of “becoming liberal,” in other words, is virtually indistinguishable historically from “integration into the U.S.-dominated geopolitical order.”

And integration has not been a passive process. Non-democracies, as Christopher Hobson has noted, have historically been labeled threatening, both behaviorally and ontologically by the West. In what almost follows naturally from this labeling process, the West has taken upon itself to employ coercive democratization or sanctions to subordinate recalcitrant polities, often resulting in worse developmental indicators in these countries, which again reinforces the superiority of liberal democracies over other competing systems. We can see this process currently at play in Iraq, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, among many others.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of examining a parallel universe identical to ours with the exception that geopolitical historical processes have no impact on regime character, such that it can be observed that states adopt liberal democracy in a vacuum and then exhibit the democratic peace among one another. In other words, we have a problem of collinearity. Still, that doesn’t mean a case for LDP can’t be made in the actual world. However, there are few convincing case studies of countries adopting liberal democracy in the absence of other pacifying factors, such as power relations during the Cold War, in which countries either sorted themselves or were sorted into blocs based on alliance with the Western order or the Soviet order.

The world order is changing. Liberal democratic peace theory is slowly losing relevance. Liberal evangelism feels passé, given recent regime change failures in the Middle East and North Africa, and backsliding in Eastern Europe. Theorists may soon have to confront the possibility that liberal democratic regimes, rather than demonstrating intrinsic benefits of liberalism, are little more than the preferred regime-type of Pax Americana.

Voices of authority are abandoning the pretense of objectivity and cheering on obstruction of elected governments by “deep state” actors, while wide swaths of the public are becoming obsessed with conspiracy theories as trust in any fact-checked consensus declines. Even well-educated people are becoming disillusioned with the system.

Many incompatible narratives are put forward about what’s going on, and where we are headed. When it’s all done, in the light of hindsight, the inevitability of it all will become clear. The uncertainty will fade, and everyone will have always known. But in the thick of the historical moment, things are not so clear at all.

How should we understand this historical moment as it unfolds? Not in hindsight, once the dust has settled, but from a live perspective, which allows for intervention.

The essence of the moment is elusive. Everyone has their own answer to the question of the times. At Palladium, ours is a particular question for the future:

What is the Post-Liberal Synthesis?

That is, the direction of history forces us to consider the looming failure of liberalism, and the need for a graceful restructuring that salvages its strengths. We think this can take the form of a coherent post-liberal synthesis, which is an actual philosophical advance, not simply the chronological sequent.

The uncertain nature of the moment is the chaotic process of different historical possibilities vying for substantiation. Without the development of a coherent post-liberal synthesis, this chaotic movement away from liberalism will be entirely negative. But with careful philosophical advancement, much more positive outcomes are viable.

This magazine is our attempt to answer the above question. This essay is about what we mean by it.

The Current International Order

A big political transition is at hand within the American-led West and beyond. It seems possible that liberalism itself, the philosophical foundation of the modernist West, is caught on the “out” side of this transition. Everyone’s thinking it, and we’re not the only ones saying it. Even true believers admit that liberalism is threatened.

But let’s define our terms. What is this “liberalism” thing? How is it threatened?

Liberalism is generally defined as a political ideology that emphasizes a synthesis of individual rights, free markets, free speech, freedom of culture and religion, primacy of the individual over society, democracy, limited government, division of powers, checks and balances, and separation of church and state.

The modern mainstream consensus includes additional elements, like social justice, social and economic equality, deconstruction of old-fashioned social structures, and so on.

To make this more concrete, we are talking not just about these ideas, but the current liberal international order and the entire body of social and political practice they legitimate.

Since its victories in the Second World War, the late 1960s, and the Cold War, this liberal order has increasingly dominated the international scene, using soft power and international institutions, backed by more aggressive diplomatic and military interventions, to push its preferred ideology.

But with the quagmire of the War on Terror, the rise of extremist and nationalist ideologies, stagnation of the economy, the deep politicization and sclerosis of institutions, the rise of China as a world power, the resurgence of Russia, and the move of other countries away from liberalism, the liberal order is looking shaky. Even its proponents are talking and acting as if it’s in crisis.

Possibilities of Failure and Success

So the current world sociopolitical order is threatened. We thus seem to exist in an historical moment of possibility, where things could go this way or that, depending on how all the factors play out. What are the possible outcomes?

We see three possibilities for how liberalism might be threatened, which need to be distinguished and addressed separately:

1. It is possible that liberalism isn’t as threatened as the more hysterical public commentators seem to think. It will inevitably get over this temporary bump of problems, and continue to be the end of history. In this case, liberalism would continue to be empirically vindicated.
2. Liberalism could be mortally threatened by an accident of history—for example, an unforeseen stagnation of the economy or imminent loss of a war due to contingent factors, which somehow causes a collapse of liberalism, but does not constitute a refutation.
3. Liberalism could be assailed not by contingent external factors, but fundamental internal factors of its own causing. Liberalism, as a way of ordering society and as an ontology with which we view the world, could have some error. Such an error would be a vulnerability, either to deliberate attack by reactionary elements, or to accidental buildup of some social problem that liberalism is constrained from noticing or solving.

The first and second possibilities, a temporary bump or even collapse due to contingent factors, is not so interesting from an intellectual perspective. If that is all that is happening, the course is clear: We must simply fight on with careful confidence and not drop the ball.

But the third possibility opens up some interesting questions. If the failure of liberalism is predetermined by its own flaws, then fighting harder for it is ultimately futile. And yet, it would still seem we must do something, because a full collapse of the liberal international order is not acceptable.

If liberalism collapses without replacement, or is overtaken by misguided revolutionaries, the result is a much more chaotic and uncertain world, potentially for a long time. We could see a large increase of terrorism, extremist ideology, tyranny, economic collapse, poverty and starvation, and even full-scale war. Or we might take a hard USSR-style haircut and transition to government by military espionage gangsters like Putin.

Even if liberalism is intrinsically flawed, we still need to fight against the possibility of this collapse. But for what?

The Fourth Possibility

There is a fourth possibility: that liberalism is flawed, but can be upgraded or replaced in an orderly fashion. If somehow we can identify the key flaws with more certainty before the possible moment of crisis, we could begin the theoretical, philosophical, and organizational work to gracefully transition from liberalism to some post-liberal synthesis.

Such a synthesis must preserve most of the value and key practical victories of liberalism, and would have to follow in the liberal intellectual tradition. But it would also have to resolve liberalism’s systemic flaws, to be able to pick up the slack, and make headway on the key problems which have stalled its progress.

This is not to be underestimated as a serious philosophical challenge, but it also seems solvable given a correct recognition of the problem and a coordinated, first-rate intellectual effort.

The major dimension of the problem is that liberalism is the unchallenged dominant paradigm of Western thought. It is nearly impossible to escape its ontologies and framings. It is thus very difficult to critique or replace.

As a longstanding dominant paradigm, liberalism’s defenses and rationalizations are many, its flaws obscured not just by redirection of attention, but by the sheer intellectual difficulty of thought outside the paradigm. As such, the vast majority of claimed flaws advanced by critics of liberalism are merely half-baked phantasms, perhaps inspired by some truth, but so twisted by imprecision and bad motives that they become mostly useless for locating the necessary insights.

We have our suspicions about the true flaws in liberalism, and what might be the key insights and ways of thinking of a new paradigm. But the above concerns demand that any treatment of these subjects be made in a more careful and rigorous way than would fit in this essay. Here we are simply introducing our questions and our program of investigation, rather than attempting to come forth with a full critique and alternative to liberal thought.

No forecast is ever certain, but at Palladium, we are acting on this fourth possibility, that liberalism is flawed, but can be productively replaced. Our project is therefore to give deep consideration to both the strengths and weaknesses of liberalism, and to gather the insights that will become the post-liberal synthesis.

Features of the Post-Liberal Synthesis

So, what will this post-liberal synthesis look like? We have some ideas:

First of all, it will not be an attempt to create the One True Ideology. It will self-consciously be an incremental improvement in how we think about how to organize society. It will be an upgrade of liberalism, which throws out and replaces many key assumptions and concepts, but does not abandon its key realized victories. It will be built in the understanding that it, too, will have problems, and will need to be replaced with a new and again superior synthesis in the future.

Second, to be properly post-liberal, as opposed to just illiberal, it must be based on a serious and deep engagement with the liberal tradition. It will have to understand and salvage as much of the good of liberalism and progressivism as possible. It will have to engage with and address the rationales for liberalism, only some of which are explicitly stated.

Third, the most obvious source of relevant critique of liberalism, where we will find the most important problems to fix and address, will be in the current opposition. From both left and right, the post-liberal synthesis must integrate the critiques of capitalism, systems of oppression, democracy, fake and controlled public discourse, valueless secularism, government overgrowth, fiat money, etc. Even if currently frustrating and destructive, the opponents of liberalism have many legitimate concerns and insights to offer, which should be incorporated into the synthesis.

Fourth, instead of being based on unattainable ideals and thought experiments about states of nature that never happened, it should be thoroughly rooted in a clear examination of how power and governance and social control actually work, and are actually experienced, and in the real processes of how political order actually comes about.

Finally, while being a self-consciously temporary and pragmatic mashup of ideas, the post-liberal synthesis must be something new, unique, and coherent in its own right, capable of inspiring real belief, especially among the elite. It can’t be just a mashup of ideas that don’t fit together; it must be the most coherent worldview we can produce, a real philosophical advance over liberalism, while fitting the constraints and opportunities of the current historical moment.

Let’s not have any illusions: even while the forces of history push towards a post-liberal synthesis, such a major step forward in the social philosophy of society, no matter how humble and pragmatic, is inherently a herculean task. It will not happen by accident, or by default, but will take deliberate effort. A willful philosophical development is required to gracefully navigate this historical transition.

Palladium’s Role

As we gaze into the future, trying to apprehend our collective destiny, the post-liberal synthesis reaches back and inspires us to make it a reality. We want to contribute to its creation.

Our most practical and immediate project is to explore the future of governance and society from as open-minded a perspective as we can muster, guided by the aspirational framework of the post-liberal synthesis:

We will explore what we can of the trends in the world, especially where they might offer important lessons we are in need of learning. Which institutions and empires are gaining ground, which are losing? How is practice evolving to better fit reality? Where are systems breaking down and why? Who has power over whom, and where are they taking us?

We will engage with the liberal tradition in all its forms, from the Founding of the American Republic and before, to New Deal progressivism, to liberal internationalist projects like the European Union, to its latest resurgence in public discourse. Our aim is to understand and appreciate, but also to critique, deconstruct, scrap for parts, and rebuild.

We will do our best to charitably get to the root of the various oppositions to liberalism, and understand their worldviews, right and left. The Internet offers up an unprecedented array of intellectual material at maximal convenience. What are they saying? Which of their critiques are valid? What do they propose? What are the concrete insights they bring to the table, and can those be liberated from that context and added to our post-liberal parts bin?

Our ultimate project aside, we hope to at least offer a valuable and stimulating discourse on the future of governance and society. We look forward to sharing it with you.