Trump Is Not a Postliberal, and MAGA Does Not Require Abandoning the Constitution

Trump is not, and has never governed as, a postliberal. His political project has been rooted in constitutional authority, national sovereignty, federalism, individual liberty, and the restoration of institutions, not the abandonment of constitutional limits in pursuit of some vaguely defined “common good.”

This distinction is becoming increasingly important because postliberal thinkers are attempting to present their movement as the intellectual foundation of MAGA. It is not. The fact that postliberals agree with Trump on immigration, trade, national sovereignty, the failures of globalism, or the destruction caused by progressive ideology does not make Trumpism postliberal. Political movements can recognize the same problems while proposing fundamentally different solutions.

Trump’s answer has consistently been America First: secure the border, restore national sovereignty, protect American industry, dismantle the unaccountable administrative bureaucracy, appoint originalist judges, defend religious liberty, return educational authority to parents and states, and prevent federal institutions from being weaponized against citizens. His stated objective has been a nation that is “proud, prosperous, and free,” not a new political regime in which government assumes authority to define and impose the highest good upon the population.

Postliberalism begins from a different premise. Its leading thinkers do not believe the American constitutional order merely needs restoration. They believe the liberal order underlying it has failed and must be replaced. They speak openly of regime change, moving beyond originalism, escaping restrictive constitutional boundaries, and using state power to form citizens according to an official conception of the common good.

These are not minor disagreements about policy. They are disagreements about what government is, where its authority ends, and whether the Constitution binds rulers even when they believe their intentions are righteous.

Patrick Deneen is among the most influential thinkers in the postliberal movement. His criticism is not confined to the progressive left, the sexual revolution, corporate globalism, or the modern administrative state. He argues that liberalism itself has failed because its own principles produced the disorder we now see.

His later book makes his objective impossible to misunderstand: Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. The publisher describes it as a plan for “replacing the liberal elite and the ideology that created and empowered them.”

Deneen is not asking conservatives merely to enforce the Constitution more faithfully. He is arguing that the liberal regime must be succeeded by a postliberal one. His proposed order would retain some existing political forms while replacing their animating philosophy and the people who control their institutions.

Deneen traces liberalism’s origins much deeper than modern progressivism, reaching back approximately five hundred years to the early modern transformation associated with the Protestant Reformation. This historical perspective is crucial because the liberal tradition he critiques encompasses more than just radical autonomy and secular individualism. It also includes the Protestant resistance to compulsory religion, the conviction that conscience answers to God, the individual’s right to engage with Scripture without ecclesiastical monopoly, and the political limits that became necessary when rulers could no longer impose religious uniformity without bloodshed.

Thus, the postliberal critique extends to the religious and constitutional settlement from which American “soul liberty” emerged. It challenges not merely what liberalism later became, but also ideas many Protestants consider profoundly Christian: that compelled belief is not genuine belief, that the magistrate cannot regenerate the soul, and that no earthly institution may claim the authority belonging to God alone.

Deneen correctly observes that liberty can devolve into license, that radical individualism can dissolve families and communities, and that markets and governments can collude to uproot people from inherited obligations. However, none of these observations prove that constitutional government should be replaced by a regime granting a new ruling class greater authority to direct citizens’ moral lives.

The answer to corrupted liberty is ordered liberty. The answer to constitutional failure is constitutional restoration. The answer is not regime change.

Adrian Vermeule is more direct about the legal theory required to sustain a postliberal order. He argues that originalism has “outlived its utility” and should be replaced by “common-good constitutionalism.” Under his approach, officials would start with substantive moral principles and interpret them into the broad language and perceived ambiguities of the Constitution.

Vermeule writes that government should direct “persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good” and considers “strong rule” exercised for that purpose legitimate. He has also argued that rulers may act for the good of citizens, even against those citizens’ own perception of what is best, because law can teach, habituate, and reform their desires.

This highlights the crucial difference between constitutional conservatism and postliberalism.

Constitutional conservatism begins with the reality of human fallenness. It does not assume that rulers are uniquely wicked, but neither does it assume they become uniquely virtuous upon entering public office. It divides power because all individuals are capable of abusing it. It defines jurisdiction because good intentions do not create legitimate authority. It binds government to written law because rulers cannot be trusted to decide for themselves when the Constitution should yield to their preferred conception of justice.

Vermeule reverses that logic. The central question becomes not whether an official possesses constitutional authority, but whether the official believes his actions advance the common good. Once this transformation occurs, the Constitution ceases to be the ruler’s binding authority and becomes material for the ruler to interpret according to his moral purposes.

That is post-constitutional government, even when it continues to employ constitutional language.

The danger should be obvious to every conservative who lived through the pandemic, government censorship, politically selective law enforcement, ideological mandates, and the weaponization of administrative agencies. The progressive left justified every one of those abuses through its own conception of the common good. Officials claimed they were protecting health, democracy, equality, safety, inclusion, and social stability.

The constitutional objection was never that progressives lacked moral convictions. The objection was that they exercised power they had no rightful authority to exercise.

Changing the identity of the ruler does not solve that problem.

Gladden Pappin has been equally candid about the postliberal attitude toward constitutional limits. In “Toward a Party of the State,” he encourages conservatives to consider policies outside what he calls “the restrictive American constitutional space.”

That phrase tells us exactly what constitutional conservatives need to know.

The American constitutional space is supposed to be restrictive. That is its purpose. The Constitution does not exist merely to create a government capable of acting. It exists to specify what that government may do, divide authority among competing institutions, preserve the powers of the states, and protect the people from officials who inevitably believe their preferred objectives justify greater power.

Pappin argues that conservatives must learn to use the state to advance their ends. But conservatives have spent generations warning that the administrative state cannot be trusted precisely because it combines rulemaking, enforcement, interpretation, and punishment within institutions largely insulated from democratic accountability.

The answer cannot be to preserve that machinery and place better people behind the controls. Every power created for our side will eventually be inherited by the other side. Every exception made for a righteous ruler becomes precedent for an unrighteous one.

The common good does not restrain power by itself. It describes the purpose for which power is allegedly being exercised. The actual restraints are constitutional jurisdiction, divided authority, due process, enumerated powers, federalism, elections, religious liberty, and individual rights.

Remove those restraints and “the common good” becomes whatever the ruler says it is.

Sohrab Ahmari has criticized the traditional conservative reluctance to use “public power to advance the common good, including in the realm of public morality.” He believes procedural liberalism and limited-government conservatism have prevented the right from using political authority effectively against cultural destruction.

His frustration is understandable. Conservatives have often behaved as though winning elections merely gives them the opportunity to manage progressive institutions more efficiently. They have failed to use legitimate authority, enforce existing law, protect children, restrain pornography, defend families, or prevent ideological institutions from consuming the country.

But there is an enormous difference between refusing to use constitutional power and rejecting constitutional limits.

Government has legitimate moral duties. It must punish violence, fraud, exploitation, theft, abuse, trafficking, and obscenity where the Constitution permits regulation. It must protect children, preserve public order, defend the country, and enforce the law equally. Constitutional government was never morally neutral. The Declaration itself grounds political authority in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and identifies the protection of God-given rights as the purpose for which governments are instituted.

The question is not whether government may pursue good ends, but whether those ends remain connected to constitutional authority.

Postliberalism repeatedly obscures that distinction. It treats constitutional objections as evidence of moral cowardice, as though anyone who refuses to grant unlimited authority to the state must not care about virtue, family, faith, or national survival.

That is false. A Christian can believe in objective moral truth while denying that government possesses jurisdiction over every moral wrong. A conservative can believe in the common good while insisting that rulers remain bound by enumerated powers. A nation can protect families, borders, communities, industry, religious liberty, and public order without creating a state authorized to direct every institution toward an official vision of human flourishing.

The common good is a necessary political objective, but it is not a constitutional limit. It cannot define its own boundaries, determine its own jurisdiction, or enforce itself impartially.

Someone must decide what the common good requires. Someone must decide which interests will be sacrificed to achieve it. Someone must determine which beliefs will be protected, merely tolerated, discouraged, or prohibited. Once those decisions are placed beyond firm constitutional restraints, the common good becomes indistinguishable from the judgment of the people holding power.

Christians, of all people, should understand the danger.

Every person falls short of the glory of God. No political class becomes immune to pride, self-interest, corruption, fear, tribalism, or the desire to dominate. The men who claim to rule for virtue remain fallen men. The judges who interpret the common good remain fallen men. The administrators who implement it remain fallen men. The religious authorities who bless it remain fallen men.

The American constitutional system does not require us to pretend that morality is subjective. It requires us to recognize that no human ruler can be trusted with unlimited authority to impose his understanding of morality upon everyone else.

That is not secularism. It is humility.

It is the recognition that Caesar is not Christ, the state is not the church, political obedience is not saving faith, and compelled conformity is not genuine conviction.

MAGA does not need postliberalism to justify securing the border. Immigration law already exists, and the federal government has constitutional authority over naturalization and national sovereignty.

MAGA does not need postliberalism to restore American manufacturing. Congress possesses powers over commerce, taxation, and tariffs.

MAGA does not need postliberalism to oppose gender ideology in federal agencies. The executive branch has the authority to control its own policies within the limits imposed by statute and the Constitution.

MAGA does not need postliberalism to dismantle the administrative state. It needs the separation of powers, congressional responsibility, judicial restraint, and the restoration of authority to elected lawmakers and the states.

MAGA does not need postliberalism to defend Christianity. It needs religious liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and a government prohibited from punishing citizens for their faith.

Trump’s judicial legacy is especially difficult to reconcile with the claim that his movement is inherently postliberal. His political coalition elevated originalism, textualism, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, federalism, and limits on administrative power. These are not post-constitutional doctrines; they are methods of restoring the Constitution as binding law.

Trump’s America First philosophy may overlap with postliberalism in its criticism of globalism, elite institutions, cultural collapse, and economic policies that sacrificed American workers. However, overlap is not identity. Trump seeks to use the constitutional authority of the American government on behalf of the American people. Postliberal thinkers seek to move beyond the liberal constitutional philosophy that limits what government may become.

Conservatives should not allow postliberals to seize ownership of nationalism, family, faith, public morality, or the common good. None of those principles requires regime change. None requires the abandonment of originalism. None requires an administrative state directed by a supposedly virtuous elite. None requires surrendering the Protestant principle that conscience belongs to God and cannot be manufactured by political authority.

You can support Trump. You can be MAGA. You can believe in borders, national sovereignty, traditional morality, strong families, religious faith, economic nationalism, and the common good while remaining completely committed to constitutional government.

In fact, that is the only way those goods remain secure.

A government powerful enough to impose your definition of the common good is powerful enough to impose your enemy’s definition tomorrow. The Constitution does not prevent us from governing morally. It prevents fallen rulers from confusing their own will with the will of God.