Eric Miller, a historian and contributor to the New Pantagruel, reviews Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons in Books and Culture. While sympathetic to many of Dreher’s conerns, Miller thinks that both liberalism and conservatism have reached their limits and that we need a politics that can speak the language of sacrifice. He looks to the tradition of populism, as articulated by thinkers like Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry, for clues to a path beyond liberalism and conservatism.

Though let me just repeat my longstanding worry that the various forms of populism and communitarianism associated with names like Lasch, Berry, MacIntyre and so on don’t do full justice to the Lockean liberal tradition of which both contemporary American liberalism and conservatism are the heirs. Liberalism, properly understood, need be neither morally nihilistic or hubristically individualist, as Christopher Insole argues in his fine book on the subject. A liberal political order can provide a space where fragile individuals are protected from the enthusiastic certainties of their fellow citizens, a concern that populism can give short shrift to.