Grounded in a sort of Catholic worldview and social teaching, the post-liberal order is directed towards the preservation and proliferation of conservative and religious values, imposing traditional beliefs about women, and their roles and addressing declining birth rates with advocacy for pro-family policies
In 2021, then-Senator JD Vance regretted the United States (US) had been turned over to people without a direct stake in the country. He said it was effectively run via the Democrats, corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless ‘cat ladies’ miserable at their lives and the choices that they have made. Vance added the ‘cat ladies’ wanted to make the rest of the country miserable too. He referred to Democrats including the then vice-president Kamala Harris and added people without children controlled the Democratic party’s future.
Vance’s dig at Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for the 2024 US presidential elections, as a cat lady was seen as a sexist framing, implying women should be excluded from public offices and that they should be at home with children. In medieval Europe, cats were associated with deviant women who did not conform to the domesticity norms.
Opponents of women’s suffrage used cartoons in the US portraying men as homemakers spending time with cats in the 19th century while their wives voted and emasculated them. In the United Kingdom, anti-suffragist propaganda likened women’s suffrage to the absurdity of giving the right to vote to cats. Suffragists Nell Richardson and Alice Burke adopted a black cat as their mascot for their suffrage movement.
‘Cat ladies’ came to signify concerns among conservatives such as JD Vance about the declining birth rate. Vance’s childless woman dig at Kamala Harris surfaced after he was named Donald Trump’s running mate for the 2024 American presidential elections. He did not disavow the ‘cat ladies’ remarks that resonated with his supporters in a country, where the birth of around 1.7 children per family is below the replacement rate.
The conservatives saw the declining birth rate as an existential challenge and sought charge of policy to raise it like in places such as Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s far-right government has adopted sweeping pro-family policies.
Orban’s government has among other things offered tax subsidies for families with children and blocked grants for newly wedded families to buy houses. Conservative intellectuals in America and pro-family advocates in Hungary have exchanged ideas on ways to raise the birthrate. In 2021, Elisabeth Zerofsky wrote in The New York Timesthat Orban’s appeal to American conservatives was not so much in the details of his laws or policies as in his tactics and his advocacy, at least publicly, for Christianity:
Orban invokes regularly, if vaguely, the ‘Christian values’ of Europe. Hungary is predominantly Catholic, though Orban himself is not, and it is not incidental that many of the American conservatives most interested in Orban’s government are part of an increasingly muscular Catholic wing of postliberal conservatives.
Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen, a Catholic described as the figurehead for post-liberal thinkers and among those who influenced JD Vance, believes the expansion of individual rights and the expansion of a free market economy undercut family, religion, communitarian, and communal ethos. In his political theory book Why Liberalism Failed, he suggested reshaping society with Catholic thought. In his 2023 book Regime Change, Deneen argued for a peaceful revolution to replace the liberal order with a post-liberal one.
Politico reporter Ian Ward, who wrote a piece headlinedThe Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview, noted Regime Change argues for a post-liberal order grounded in a sort of Catholic worldview and Catholic social teaching though Deneen does not say that explicitly. The post-liberal order is directed towards the preservation and proliferation of conservative and religious values. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has called himself a member of the post-liberal right.
Deneem is among those who question whether what liberals call progress and social change dating back to the 1960s has been good for society. Ian Ward noted Vance does not think it has been. ‘…he comes from this world that thinks sort of the sexual revolution was a mistake or has had terrible unintended consequences, that women’s entrance into the workforce has not been the sort of boon for feminism that liberals make it out to be.’
In a 2022 tweet, Vance said if your worldview tells you that it is bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had. Ward said this is part of a broader critique that the culture war is a class war, liberals have weaponized social views to consolidate and advance their economic interests. Vance argues that the idea that it is liberating for women to enter the workforce ultimately redounds to the benefit of companies from more and cheaper labour.
The US presidential election in November 2024 was thus the most consequential poll vis-a-vis the fate of liberal democracy after the gains of the far-right in Europe. Another Trump presidency is feared to transform America into an autocracy, the signs of which were evident when he encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol after failing to overturn the election results in January 2021.
