Postliberal Dogmatism and Determinism

For some time now, many "liberal conservatives" (Russell Kirk's approving term for Alexis de Tocqueville in The Conservative Mind) have repeatedly objected that conservative postliberal critics of America simply ignore the facts of American history. (My own contributions to this discussion date back to my Public Discourse exchange with Patrick Deneen in 2014.) The repeated postliberal claim that America was founded upon an anthropology of expressive individualism finds no support in the public speeches, writing, events, laws, and institutions that constitute American political identity.