of the greatest differences of America (and the Anglosphere more broadly) and the rest of the world was the concept that there was a separation of people and state. Going back over 800 years ago, even before the Magna Carta, was the Charter of the Forest which distinguished between the right of the people, on an individual basis, to use the forests and the right of the state, in the body of the King, to control it as the state, in the body of the King, willed and dictated. This was one of the first examples of our modern heritage stemming back from over throwing the “Norman Yoke” of Continental Europe, and certainly the earliest overt signs thereof. This heritage and birthright of all those who hold such precious things in common has helped protect America from more European notions that arose within the past couple of centuries or so, and thus helped, even if imperfectly, to inoculate us from these foreign ideas from foreign peoples in foreign countries without a “shared” history.
But that hasn’t stopped some populist elites from declaring that the public is private and the private public. Case in point: J.D. Vance:
JD Vance identifying himself as part of "the postliberal right" and saying, "there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime" at a May 2023 ISI event with his friends Patrick Deneen & Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts: pic.twitter.com/EGPQ5IQjNH
— Jason Hart (@jasonahart) August 7, 2025
And no, the “full clip” does not give context that magically changes the plain words of J.D Vance. He was not being descriptive of a bad thing, but instead embracing those means as a tool for his own ends.
This is, fundamentally, an Unamerican view echoed, ironically enough, not just by a foreigner with foreign ideas from a foreign land without shared history, but from a leader who speaks a foreign language so foreign as to make Iranian and Hindi literally and linguistically related in a way his language isn’t.
But beyond the Unamerican foreignness of J.D. Vance’s views, let us look at the crux of the argument: The “private” sphere is at least a greater threat than government, if not much more, and that thus to keep them in check the “public” sphere through the “people” must free itself and the government from the “elite” by becoming the government—a dictatorial will of “We The People” exercised through the government. The “organic intellectuals”, in this view, will be simply brave spokesmen for this collective will to keep the enemies of “We The People” in line—said “organic intellectuals” being as infallible as the “We The People” that they claim to speak for.
When “there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime” then America is defined as “all within the state; nothing outside the state; nothing against the state”, being the vehicle for the “public” and “We The People”.
But note how these very integral American elements of society are denigrated as “liberal” or “neo-liberal” and this “New Right” as “postliberal”. It is a turn of phrase that exploits the appropriation of the term “liberal” by the Progressive Left. But they don’t mean it that way. If anything, they love what the Progressive Left love when it came to power and organizing society. It is an attack on Classical Liberalism, of the Lockean variety, being a distillation of that American (and before it Anglospheric) cultural values; it is also an attack on (Burkean) conservatism which was about protecting the conditions which allowed that to thrive, and even post-Western civilization à la continental Europe over the last two centuries or so. To wit: They’d rather have what the French Revolution stood for, abet with American characteristics, than the actual American Revolution and what it stood for.
This line of thinking is not just “post-liberal”, but “post-American”, and wish to fundamentally transform America into something different, except for the most superficial parts which are to be worn like a skinsuit. They wish to replace the “Spirit of ‘76” with the “Spirit of ‘48”, again abet with “American characteristics”.
Where does such Unamerican thinking lead? No place good, that’s for sure.
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