The age of liberalism is coming to an end. Far-right governments now rule in six EU countries. The United States of America is no longer a liberal republic. If it were, Donald Trump and Elon Musk would not be able so easily to push over its rotted liberal institutions (Congress, the courts, the newspapers, the civil service et cetera), and a majority of American voters would not be so happy to see them do it.
The other western liberal democracies totter on, but the hollowing-out of liberal institutions is well advanced almost everywhere. (Thanks to the Church’s influence, Ireland came late to genuine liberalism, and our institutions still seem relatively solid – for now.) We’ve been living through this hollowing-out process for the last four decades. Since about 1980, elites have manipulated a globalised economy to enrich and empower themselves and to leave everyone else by the wayside. And everyone knows this. Far-right politicians now thrive on a widely felt and not unjustified resentment. The West’s silence on Gaza has demolished the last of its moral authority. Faith in liberal institutions is evaporating. We’re in a postliberal world.
The liberal age began in 1945, was sponsored by the United States, and was built out of the ashes of the second World War. During its peak decades, American-sponsored liberalism was hypocritical, to be sure. It proclaimed Enlightenment values even as it pursued a vicious realpolitik to the West’s (that is, America’s) advantage.
But it did give us a world in which a historically unprecedented number of people (in the West) could benefit from the protections of law, public health services, freedom of expression and economic security. It gave us a world in which formerly outcast minorities could campaign, often successfully, for rights and recognition. When we mourn liberalism’s passing, these are the things we will grieve for.
But liberalism failed in significant ways. Its most serious failure was this: it did not give meaning to people’s lives. This was deliberate. The liberal order was partly constructed in order to prevent anything like the second World War from ever happening again. And it was partly constructed to form a bulwark against its most powerful ideological rival, Soviet communism. To do this, cold war liberalism drew on the ideas of Isaiah Berlin, one of liberalism’s greatest thinkers.
Berlin, a Russian émigré, believed that giving people a positive meaning for their lives (such as religion or fascism or Soviet communism) was dangerous, because it led inevitably to conflict and destruction. In Two Concepts of Liberty, a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1958, Berlin argued that the postwar liberal democracies should be built not on “positive freedom” (the freedom to do a specific, named thing) but “negative freedom” (freedom from restraint, with no particular instructions about the uses to which your freedom might be put). Negative freedom was a defence against fascism and communism, the ideologies over which liberalism had triumphed.
During the liberal age, we grew up into a great vacuum. We were free to do anything we wanted to do. But nothing was more obviously meaningful than anything else. So nothing we did seemed to answer the sense of lack within us. During the age of liberalism, the people of the privileged West fell hard for lifestyle quackery, or cults, or careerism, or psychoanalysis, or nostalgic religious faith, or art, or the lure of fame. Or all of the above. But the lack remained.
Much of the mainstream art of the liberal age is in some deep way about this predicament as it manifested in the lives of privileged liberal Westerners. To take a random and non-chronological sample from a truly vast archive: The Catcher in the Rye, Taxi Driver, The Bell Jar, Waiting for Godot, Herzog, Death of a Salesman, Catch-22, The Crying of Lot 49, French New Wave cinema, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Harold Pinter’s plays, the novels of John Banville, the films of Woody Allen, Wall Street, Sex and the City, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Lena Dunham’s Girls, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, the novels of Michel Houellebecq, the novels of Sally Rooney, The Sopranos ... All of them are about the basic lack at the heart of the liberal age, as experienced by people who had no recognition to fight for, no injustices to topple.
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Whole popular genres evolved to address or to ameliorate the lack. The literary novel – the central liberal art form – tried to answer the lack by asserting the value of individual consciousness. Romantic comedies tried to answer the lack with love. Crime stories tried to answer it with a sense of the integrity of the social order. Science fiction tried to answer it with dreams of progress and power. Rock’n’roll tried to answer it with hedonism.
But the emptiness of all these forms has been visible for some time now. Why have middlebrow literary novels become so hollow and unsatisfying? Why are all Hollywood films and TV shows now sequels or reboots? Why is the rock album dead? Why is mainstream pop music the same now as it was 30 years ago?
Let’s stick with the literary. By “middlebrow literary novels” I mean the sort of novel that gets nominated for or wins a literary prize, or is a popular book club pick. Over the last two decades these novels have increasingly tended to be set in the past, or to assert, somehow unpersuasively, that we are all connected by love in the end. A good instance is provided by the novels of Elif Shafak, huge best-sellers that are set in the past and that assert, somehow unpersuasively, that we are all connected by love in the end.
As middlebrow novels have grown less convincing, they have also grown longer: John Lanchester’s Capital (2012), Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014), Ian McEwan’s Lessons (2022), Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022). The best recent middlebrow novels have been sharp enough to take the late failures of liberalism as their subject, as in Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads (2021) and Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (2024).
As the social and political forms of liberalism have been emptied out, so have its cultural forms: the middlebrow novel, the Hollywood movie, the rock album, the pop song. It isn’t that people have stopped working in these forms. People will continue to write and read middlebrow novels, Hollywood will keep making movies, and so on. It’s that the forms have lost their sponsoring faith, and therefore their cultural centrality. This will become more obvious as the 21st century goes on.
What will rise up instead are postliberal art forms. It’s possible, indeed, to suggest that some postliberal art forms are already with us – are already demonstrating their cultural centrality to the new age.
Kitsch, of course, is making a comeback. Authoritarian regimes adore kitsch. And Trump has already hollowed out the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC – another liberal institution, named for a liberal hero – and promised that it will stage “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas”. Which will undoubtedly be kitsch central – postliberal art in action.
One postliberal art form that’s already with us is clearly the decodable spectacle. For instance, Kendrick Lamar’s Superbowl half-time show. What you were supposed to do with this performance was read its coded messages, and if you could read the codes, you felt that you were part of a community. Why was Serena Williams doing a Crip walk beside a lamp-post? I get that! (An explanation for normal people: Williams was criticised by right-wing US media for doing a Crip walk – supposedly evidence of gang affiliation – at Wimbledon in 2012; plus Williams has “beef” with Drake, another rapper and Kendrick Lamar’s ostensible enemy.) Or you could shout along with one famous millionaire calling another famous millionaire a paedophile – the accusation isn’t seriously meant, it’s all just part of the coded message to fans. It creates the sense of belonging to a tribe.
One form of postliberal art, we might suggest, is and will continue to be about tribes and codes – huge confrontational spectacles addressed to those in the know – the fans. (This fits one definition of a fascist aesthetic. But then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been preparing Americans to welcome a fascist aesthetic for years now.) Lamar’s Superbowl show was like a giant music video crammed with “Easter eggs” (hidden references that only fans will get). And this might be another postliberal art form – think of Taylor Swift’s video for Look What You Made Me Do, or indeed Taylor Swift’s entire career at this point, which consists of a baroque sequence of coded messages to her loyal fans.
The Hollywood movie has already been superseded by what you might call ambient TV: programmes on streaming services that you watch while you’re looking at your phone. You tune in and out. You are multiply engaged. But you are also multiply distracted. Distraction will increasingly be the name of the game for popular art forms, as the world gets worse around us and as authoritarians seek cover as they grab cash from the common purse.
Another form of postliberal art that’s already with us is the fictional universe built on message boards by diverse hands using fortuitous images. The Backrooms, a sort of uncanny alternative reality built by 4Chan users from images of bland contemporary spaces, is one example; there are many others. Again, the point is in-group identification, the construction of a coded tribe. Postliberal art will almost certainly reject the individualism that made the novel and the Hollywood movie the central art forms of the liberal age.
What all of these forms of postliberal art have in common is that they depend on the internet to function – as the middlebrow novel, the Hollywood movie and the rock album did not. The art of the future will happen on your phone.
What about literature? Hard to say what kind of literary forms will dominate in a postliberal world. But I will point out that the dominant literary form of the 21st century is already very clearly the essay. Substack is the latest venue for this dominance. The essay – personal or discursive or both – thrives online, because it invites comment, response, argument (that is, community) and because it can be read quickly – on your phone.
Postliberal art will not offer the sense of progressive communitarian uplift hoped for by left-wing critics of the liberal age. Instead, it will express and manipulate the new tribal world left behind by the failure of liberalism. What will a mature postliberal art look like? We’ll find out soon enough. To quote a line from South Park, one of the last great popular artworks of the liberal age: Buckle up, buckaroos.
Kevin Power is Assistant Professor of Literary Practice at the Oscar Wilde Centre, School of English, Trinity College Dublin
