Unlike the MAGA movement, which is led by a candidate who is defiantly amoral, post-liberalism is steeped in a revolutionary religiosity.
Most Americans haven’t heard of the post-liberal right, the small but influential group of conservative, mostly Catholic men who have declared that liberal democracy, the animating principle of America’s founding, has failed and want to bring about a new social order where there is no separation of church and state and men and a hyperconservative Catholicism reign supreme. They are disdainful of secularism and individual liberty. Just like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump illustrated during Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, these men idolize the authoritarian Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.
They’re also nostalgic for Spain as it was run by the dictator Franco and see Orbán’s government and Franco’s as potential models for the kind of regime they wish to install in the United States. The group’s political priorities — which include restricting access to contraception and divorce and banning marriage equality and pornography — are wildly unpopular. And yet the Republican nominee for vice president, my former friend JD Vance, is a prominent voice of this fringe movement, as so many of his regrettable podcast interviews have demonstrated.
Well… it’s either a change, or a revelation of their true self.
But either way, yes, It is.
About a year and a half into the pandemic, I learned The Guy who I had considered one of my closest friends for years was essentially a psychopath, but was also really good at hiding it. Like sure, there were signs, and I and others in our friend group would scratch our heads about The Guy every once in a while, but more or less chalked it up to him being a prickly non-neurotypical asshole sometimes (similar to myself, if I’m honest).
And then The Guy told me some wild shit that went down between himself and one of my other really good buddies, who is bi, though happily married to his wife, but was going through some really rough emotional shit at the time, and (reading between the lines after sobering up the next day) The Guy essentially took a really close friendship and abused and manipulated it to more or less hook up with our mutual friend.
And then some months later, when quarantimes were starting to relax after the vax rollout, I got together with a few people from our friend group and learned that The Guy said he had more or less pulled this same trick with another really close friend of mine who’d been struggling with fairly severe depression for years. And then we began comparing notes and connecting the dots right there and came to the unavoidable conclusion that The Guy was basically a psychopathic sexual predator on the down-low. Oh, and that The Guy apparently beats his dog every once in a while.
That was a horrifying conclusion for all of us. The Guy was pretty quickly excised from our friend group.
TL;DR: yes. It sucks when a psycho works their way into your friend group. It really fucking sucks.