Post-liberals, led by law professor Adrian Vermeule and writer Sohrab Ahmari, have begun to offer concrete policy proposals that would instantiate their agenda for the common good as they see it. Vermeule, in a tweet, and Ahmari, in the American Conservative, advocate a return to “blue laws,” which mandate that businesses close on Sundays in honor of the Christian Sabbath. The exact contours of these laws are underdeveloped — federal, state, or local? which businesses? — but will surely come into greater focus as post-liberal thinkers cultivate this seed into a fully flowered policy item. But for now, the Sabbatarian salvo provides a good opportunity to examine what a truly conservative orientation to public policy looks like, and where post-liberals go off track.
To think about advancing an agenda that achieves the highest conservative aspirations for the state — order, prosperity, human flourishing, even public virtue — we must ask an antecedent question: Why do we conserve? Why should we insist on a connection between our traditions and our normative aims?
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