These are modern voices carrying forward Traditionalist and anti-liberal ideas.
Patrick Deneen – Post-Liberal Critic
Essential Works:
- Why Liberalism Failed – Diagnosis of liberal exhaustion
- Regime Change – What comes after liberalism?
Key Ideas:
- Liberalism is self-destructive – Its own logic undermines community, virtue, and solidarity
- Atomization and alienation – Liberal autonomy creates loneliness and despair
- Need for a new order – Post-liberal politics rooted in place, community, and virtue
Why Essential: Deneen is the most mainstream articulation of post-liberal thought. He's reached a wide audience and shifted the Overton window.
Yoram Hazony – Conservative Nationalism
Essential Works:
- The Virtue of Nationalism – Case for nation-states vs. empire and globalism
- Conservatism: A Rediscovery – Anglo-American conservative tradition
Key Ideas:
- Nationalism vs. imperialism – Nations as natural units of human flourishing
- Biblical foundations of nationalism – Tribes, covenants, and peoplehood
- Rejection of universal empire – Whether liberal (EU, UN) or authoritarian
Why Essential: Hazony makes a philosophical case for nationalism that's not racialist or chauvinistic. It's rooted in biblical and historical tradition.
Paul Kingsnorth – Dark Ecology & Neo-Monasticism
Essential Works:
- Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist – Critique of green progressivism
- The Wake (novel) – Post-Conquest England, loss of traditional world
- Savage Gods – Disenchantment and re-enchantment
Key Ideas:
- Dark ecology – Nature is not our friend; wildness is inhuman
- Uncivilization – Manifesto for new culture after collapse
- Neo-monasticism – Withdraw, preserve, wait for new order
Kingsnorth combines ecological awareness, Christian mysticism, and anti-modern critique. He's living it—converted to Orthodox Christianity, left modern society, homesteading in Ireland.
Rod Dreher – Benedict Option
Essential Works:
- The Benedict Option – Strategic withdrawal to preserve tradition
- Live Not By Lies – Soft totalitarianism and Christian resistance
Key Ideas:
- Strategic withdrawal – Build resilient communities while culture collapses
- Thick community – Deep roots, liturgy, education, mutual aid
- Soft totalitarianism – Not camps, but social pressure, deplatforming, cancellation
Dreher is popularizing the Traditionalist strategy of withdrawal and preservation for mainstream Christians.