Why Sargon of Akkad, Nick J. Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson Are Natural Allies
Anonymous
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In the fractious landscape of the contemporary right, few figures command as much attention and controversy as Carl Benjamin (better known as Sargon of Akkad), Nick J. Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson. They differ sharply in style: Sargon’s raw, YouTube-fueled polemics; Fuentes’s unapologetic ethno-nationalism; Carlson’s suave, prime-time dissections of elite folly. Yet beneath these aesthetic variances lies a shared intellectual current, one that binds them as unlikely but logical confrères. Each, in his way, diagnoses the West’s ailments as the fruit of “liberalism” and prescribes a robust state as the remedy. This is no mere coincidence of phrasing; it is the hallmark of postliberalism, a movement that mirrors the woke left’s own sleight of hand: identify a genuine cultural pathology, pin it on an ideological scapegoat, then summon Leviathan to enforce the cure.
Postliberalism has electrified the right-wing intelligentsia, intentionally converting conservatives, with thinkers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule in the United States, and Philip Blond and Nick Timothy in the United Kingdom, leading the charge. They argue that liberalism (broadly conceived) bears responsibility for the West’s unraveling: the erosion of community, the commodification of intimacy, the triumph of atomized desire over shared purpose. As the abstract of a recent critique aptly summarizes, “Postliberalism has emerged as an influential ideology, especially on the political right. Its leading figures include Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule in the U.S. and Philip Blond and Nick Timothy in the U.K. Postliberals claim that liberalism has caused the woes of the contemporary West.”
This rhetoric has ignited timelines and symposiums alike, turning debates into skirmishes over a single, overloaded term.
The sleight of hand is subtle but devastating. “Liberalism” serves as a capacious junk drawer, conflating two antithetical traditions: classical liberalism, with its emphasis on ordered liberty under law, and modern progressivism, which deploys the state as an instrument of moral engineering. The former champions individuals as moral agents, accountable to God, neighbor, and tradition within a framework of rights and duties. The latter views citizens as malleable clay, to be reshaped by bureaucratic fiat for their own supposed benefit. By lumping these together, postliberals can indict the American Founders for the depredations of TikTok-fueled distraction and corporate rainbow capitalism. As the same critique observes, “They use ‘liberalism’ to cover both classical liberals and liberals in the modern American sense: that is, left-wing progressives.”
The result? A timeline aflame with civil war, where interlocutors quarrel not over realities but over a word’s emotional freight.
This conflation is no accident; it is essential to the postliberal project. Classical liberalism, contra its detractors, does not equate to “remove every impediment to desire” (a straw man erected by adversaries and echoed by false allies eager to supplant it). Instead, it presumes human virtue, granting individuals the dignity of self-governance while binding them to communal norms through common law and moral suasion. “Alas, they mistake individualism for the view that the state should remove all impediments to the satisfaction of individuals’ desires when, in fact, it is the view that individuals should make decisions for themselves,” the critique notes.
“They are wrong to conflate classical liberalism and progressivism.”
Progressivism, by contrast, is the true antithesis: a regime that treats persons as raw material for state-sponsored redemption, complete with reeducation camps disguised as sensitivity training. Postliberals blur this line because clarity would expose their prescription, a state no longer neutral on the good life, but actively enlisted to impose a “Christian and communitarian conception” of it. If the pathology stems from unchecked liberty, the antidote is coerced virtue. If it arises from progressive overreach, the solution is restraint: chaining the administrative behemoth that has ballooned since the World War I era.
Consider the maladies postliberals decry, which they attribute to an excess of freedom rather than an excess of state power. The family’s decline? Not the Founders’ gift of free speech, but the capture of economic and educational institutions by a managerial elite, for whom marriage and childrearing are mere impediments to workforce fungibility and ideological conformity. This is no libertarian idyll; it is soft despotism, spritzed with the eau de toilette of human resources. Local communities? They withered not from the liberty to peruse contraband volumes at booksellers, but from the centralization of authority in corporate and governmental nodes, which drown civic initiative in regulatory quicksand. “You cannot start a business, build a house, or teach your kid without wading through a swamp of permissions,” as one might put it; that is progressive control, not individualism.
Even the pornographic inferno consuming public life owes less to unfettered markets than to the unholy wedlock of tech monopolies and a culture of unaccountable predation. Yet postliberals insist that classical liberal or conservate individualism inexorably births this leviathan, redefining selfhood from moral agency (”I am a person, not livestock; I must answer for my choices”) to sovereign hedonism. Within the former frame, duty, tradition, and moral thickness flourish organically; in the latter caricature, they wither into farce. As the critique charges, “Postliberals fail to make their case that liberalism has harmed Western populations because they do not take proper account of the gains due to liberalism. And much of what they lament is caused not by individual liberty but by the growth of the state since WWI. Postliberals claim, however, that the individualism of classical liberalism inevitably leads to the growth of the state.”
This diagnostic sleight brings us to our trio. Sargon of Akkad has veered toward pronouncements that liberalism is a spent force, ripe for supplantation by a “civilizational program” of renewed vigor. Fuentes articulates it with stark, blood-and-soil fervor. Carlson orbits the same core, his broadcasts laced with pleas to shield the volk from “chaos” via enlightened guardianship. Aesthetics diverge: Sargon’s pugilism, Fuentes’s firebrand zeal, Carlson’s patrician drawl. But the etiology converges: liberalism as toxin, the state as elixir, now sanctified in Christian-communitarian garb. They part ways only on the throne’s occupant, not its fundamentals.
Beneath this alliance lurks a more profound peril, one that unmasks postliberalism’s kinship with its ostensible foe, Marxism.
Both traditions repose faith in an enlightened vanguard (be it commissars or confessional clerics) deemed wise enough to blueprint society from on high. Both culminate in coercion, for human nature defies fiat. “They are also wrong to recommend that politicians promote a particular conception of the good life,” the critique warns. “No one is clever enough to know how strangers should live better than those strangers do themselves. And no one is virtuous enough to be trusted with the power to make others live as he sees fit.”
These lines should be etched into the postliberal conscience. Every entreaty to “redeem” the administrative state through right-wing moralism replays the left’s perennial reverie: a priesthood of the pure, wielding coercion for the collective weal. But the state, once baptized, devours its summoners.
You cannot domesticate the beast; it will turn, godlike, then jailer.
Sargon, Fuentes, and Carlson are thus fellow wayfarers, charting a path from ordered liberty toward a collectivism rechristened as salvation. Whether they avow it candidly or merely prime the pump for its arrival is the lingering query. For those who cherish republics, the counsel is clear: In moments of moral tumult, do not barter constitutional dikes for therapeutic panics. That exchange invariably concludes in the same theater: the state, no longer servant, enthroned as sovereign, then scourge.Quotations from “Taking liberties: Why postliberals are wrong about personal freedom” https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/314013
The author of this piece asked to remain anonymous