The End of MAGA — and What Comes Next

T he moment is approaching when “Make America Great Again” will no longer be the prevalent strain of U.S. conservative politics. Since MAGA as a movement has never been defined by ideas nearly as much as by the personality of President Donald J. Trump, the latter’s impending departure from the presidency puts the future of the right once again up for grabs. The figure best positioned to take the reins is Vice President JD Vance, and his ideological replacement for MAGA has a name: post-liberalism.

While the term “post-liberalism” has its origins in Anglican theological debate, American Catholics have appropriated it for themselves. For them, post-liberalism refers to their vision of an executive-dominated state that would use power to impose a Catholic vision of “the common good.” Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule defines the common good as “justice, peace, and abundance” — and insists that liberty is secondary to this holy trinity. Vermeule “makes no fetish of Liberty” and argues that “the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself.”

Post-liberals have largely de-emphasized their religious and social priorities in favor of a wide-ranging public-policy agenda. But I will stick to post-liberal economic policy — which is indistinguishable from progressivism. While previous generations of conservatives defended economic liberty and free markets, post-liberals blame these very values for the hollowing out of the American industrial base.

In a campaign speech in 2022, Vance ranted about “the prevailing neoliberal, neoconservative orthodoxy” that dominated “Conservative Inc.” and drove them to support “trade deals and trade policies . . . bad for workers.” At the same event, University of Notre Dame political theorist Patrick J. Deneen showed unflattering photographs of a postindustrial Ohio town as evidence of this hollowing out, quipping that one could really “taste the liberty.”

Vance’s intent as president, as he wrote in a 2020 essay for the American Mind, would be to “thrust more daggers” into “neoliberalism” and to implement the “neo-Hamiltonian approach to economics” advocated by figures such as Oren Cass of the think tank American Compass. To that end, Vance declared the need to penalize American firms that outsource unskilled labor, and to incentivize “firms to move some of their manufacturing capacity back to the United States.”

Vance has also repeatedly decried “King Dollar,” the position of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency — in part because he says a strong dollar incentivizes Americans’ consumption of imported over homemade goods. Forcibly devaluing the dollar — coupled with Vance’s favored government-picks-the-winners industrial policy — would do an impeccable job of rendering American consumers unable to buy everyday goods.

And for what? On April 12, 2023, Vance argued on Fox & Friends that such costs are worth it because of the benefits to American exporters. The beneficiaries of this would also be those who receive the rehoming subsidies, namely firm owners and their investors. In essence, Vance’s economic agenda would undercut both American consumers and U.S. manufacturers that depend on imports or primarily sell to the domestic market.

Today, most large firms depend on global supply chains for their inputs to production. Vance’s efforts to rehome all these supply chains would lead to national shortages, black markets, and misery. The costs of production for many goods would exceed a sustainable market for them, meaning that Americans would lose not only purchasing power but also the availability of the goods themselves.

One country that attempted this approach aggressively was Spain under dictator Francisco Franco, who is a major hero to Catholic post-liberals and other Vance supporters because of his purported defense of the Catholic Church against communism during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Franco also abolished representative government, which might seem tolerable to contemporary post-liberals because Franco ostensibly upheld the Catholic faith, despite his conduct during his rule. Popular “conservative” media figures like podcasters Jack Posobiec and Michael Knowles, prominent post-liberals like Catholic University of America theologian Chad C. Pecknold, now the principal director of cultural outreach at the Department of Homeland Security, and major funders of Vance-aligned institutions like Charles Haywood have all expressed their admiration for Franco.

What was Franco’s economic legacy? After the Spanish Civil War, Franco pursued autarky — or the complete closing of Spanish markets to global trade. The result was los años del hambre, or “the hunger years,” during which hundreds of thousands of Spaniards died of starvation. As Gloria Román Ruiz and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco concluded in their article on the subject:

Despite the excuses given by Franco’s dictatorship, we now know that the famine of the 1940s in Spain had its origin in the economic protectionism promoted by the autarchy at the end of the civil war. This system, in place for more than a decade for nationalistic purposes, led to price rises and shortages of basic necessities and paved the way for corruption. On top of this, it failed miserably.

This is the post-liberal vision for the United States. Whatever problems one might have had with MAGA are nothing compared with what might replace it.