On the brave new Post-Liberal Political Order of the West, its nature and its prospects

I have now written many pieces about the escalating efforts of the German government to protect democracy from itself by abolishing a wide range of traditionally democratic freedoms. We are seeing here the glimmerings of a new, Post-Liberal Political Order (PLPO). Like other major political shifts, this one has deep roots, but it matured during the pandemic. The lockdowns and the mass vaccination hysteria soon faded, but the PLPO endured, blooming anew as establishment failures deepened the unpopularity of the political class.

This malignancy regards ordinary people and their political preferences not only as an enemy, but – much worse – as a problem to be solved. As we all know, intractable problems and schemes to solve them are the lifeblood of modern technocracies. They have tried to solve a wide range of insoluble problems, from the weather to poverty to viruses, and now they will attempt to solve us.

Despite its post-liberal nature, the PLPO still operates within a world of liberal assumptions and terminology. Thus it constructs its repressions either as regrettable measures necessary to save our free and open society from ideological threats like fascism, or even as a higher and truer manifestation of democracy itself. To maintain the democratic facade and cast itself on the side of “the people,” the PLPO eagerly conflates foreign enemies like Russia with domestic opposition, while sponsoring sham pro-regime protests through party apron organisations. In this way the opinions of actual voters may be disregarded as the agitations of fifth-columnists or foreign agents, and replaced with a new pseudopopulist facade that appears not only to support but even to demand all the antidemocratic measures that the PLPO has prepared in its cabinet of horrors.