Fair warning: This will be an entire column about a single paragraph.
The paragraph's author is Adam Serwer, a writer for The Atlantic, weighing in on the complicated, sometimes baffling debate on the right about the relationship between religious conservatives and libertarianism … or maybe the relationship between religious conservatives and Donald Trump … or maybe the relationship between religious conservatives and the liberal democratic order.
I think the debate is mostly about the first two issues, with the "post-liberal" flirtations of some conservative intellectuals just a tug at the extreme. Serwer, like many critics of the Trump-era right, thinks otherwise, and in an Atlantic essay he argues at length that religious conservatives are increasingly illiberal and authoritarian in their rejection of the secular and socially liberal destination where American democracy is heading. And then, taking specific exception to my suggestion that some possibletrajectories for the liberal order might justify an openness to "post-liberal" alternatives, he writes as follows:
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