Five hundred meters of heresy are floating off Tarajal.

The pneumatic barrier installed off Ceuta rises only a few dozen centimeters above the Mediterranean, sinks below the surface, runs parallel to a line of buoys, and leaves enough room for Guardia Civil patrol boats to monitor the maritime border with Morocco. Madrid had it deployed after the crisis of July 30, when between 50,000 and 60,000 people entered the Spanish enclave within a matter of hours. Pedro Sánchez arrived in Ceuta the following day, met security forces at Tarajal, and described what had happened as a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity.

Sánchez remains a socialist. Spain has not signed up to the National Conservatism manifesto, and no one in Brussels is preparing a restoration of Westphalia. Yet the barrier is there. As it is inflated on the water, the European Union has already reached a political agreement on a new common system for returns that provides for return hubs in third countries and makes forced return mandatory in several circumstances; the Pact on Migration and Asylum entered fully into application on June 12. The Commission now writes that an effective return system is necessary to “disincentivise illegal arrivals” and to keep Schengen functioning. Ten years ago, language like this would have been enough to trigger a public trial for crimes against solidarity.

London is even more interesting. The Labour government titled its immigration white paper Restoring Control over the Immigration System. Introducing it in the House of Commons, Yvette Cooper described the previous policy as a “free market experiment on immigration”: employers had been allowed to recruit abroad without being required to address domestic skills and labour shortages. The government document now explicitly links immigration, labour-market policy, and domestic training, with the stated aim of reducing dependence on international recruitment.

In the United States, Trump has pushed this reversal much further, declaring a national emergency at the southern border on the day he returned to the White House and involving the armed forces in territorial control. The turn, however, had begun under Biden. On June 4, 2024, his administration restricted access to asylum for people crossing the southwest border irregularly; the following month, Border Patrol encounters between official ports of entry fell by 29 percent, while the daily average was less than half the level recorded before the measure.

The laziest reading would say that the right has won on immigration. It is too early for that. More importantly, it is too little.

What is giving way runs deeper than the old divide between parties that favor or oppose restrictive immigration policies. One of the core beliefs of the post-Cold War order is losing its force: the idea that the growing mobility of people belonged to the same historical direction as the growing mobility of goods, capital, information, and production. Politics could slow it, administer it, perhaps correct some excesses. Stopping to ask whether that direction was desirable increasingly seemed like an illegitimate question.

It was the privilege of inevitability. Immigrationism exercised it for thirty years.

The last theology of the frictionless world

In 1987 Joseph Carens published one of the most radical and intellectually coherent arguments for open borders. He took Rawls, Nozick, and utilitarianism - profoundly different theories of justice - and tried to show that, followed through to their consequences, all three offered few moral grounds for preventing a human being from moving from a poor country to a rich one. The distinction between citizens and foreigners looked to him like a modern form of feudal privilege: a status received at birth capable of determining an enormous share of a person’s life chances.

The argument deserves to be taken seriously, because it is far more interesting than its talk-show version. If the individual is the fundamental moral unit and two human beings possess equal dignity regardless of where they were born, the border does indeed present a problem. A man born in Tijuana can reach San Diego in twenty minutes and multiply his economic opportunities by crossing a line. Another receives those opportunities at birth because his mother happened to give birth a few miles farther north. Seen from the standpoint of the isolated individual, the border looks arbitrary.

The problem begins with those two words: isolated individual.

Patrick Deneen has built his critique of liberalism precisely around the progressive emancipation of the individual from inherited attachments and obligations. In Why Liberalism Failed, he argues that the pursuit of individual autonomy has simultaneously expanded state power and weakened civic commitments; elsewhere, he has described contemporary elites as especially capable of living a deracinated mobility, turning upward mobility itself into a form of departure from place and from the communities that formed them.

Christopher Lasch had seen something similar by 1995. The Revolt of the Elites described an increasingly mobile, cosmopolitan professional class able to work and live inside networks that crossed borders and made it progressively less dependent on the places it physically inhabited. Lasch inverted Ortega: the problem facing Western democracy no longer arose only from a revolt of the masses, because part of the elite had begun to separate its own fate from that of the rest of society.

Immigrationism developed inside the same mental landscape. Its originality lay in turning a fact as old as humanity - migration - into an implicit philosophy of history. Mobility acquired a presumption in its favor. A person capable of crossing countries and cultures seemed better suited to the new world than someone tied to a factory, a province, a language, a church, a home. Portable identity was modern; inherited identity was required to explain itself.

Here cultural progressivism met economic liberalism with surprising ease. The first looked at the border and saw an arbitrary privilege. The second discovered, in the same border, friction in the circulation of one of the factors of production.

Karl Polanyi would have recognized the problem immediately. In The Great Transformation, he called labor a fictitious commodity: the market treats it like a commodity even though behind it stands a person, and that person cannot be separated without consequence from the social environment in which he lives. Later scholarship on Polanyi has continued to locate here one of the decisive points in his critique of the self-regulating market.

The migrant worker makes the contradiction almost visible. To the firm, he is labor supply. To universalist progressivism, he is the bearer of rights that precede national membership. To the state, he becomes a taxpayer, resident, user of services and, in many cases, a future citizen. In real life he enters a neighborhood, enrolls a child in school, and brings memory, religion, habits, expectations. A history begins between him and the people who were there before.

The market can put a price on his labor. Politics has to decide everything else.

It is difficult to find an area in which hyper-globalization tried more stubbornly to avoid precisely that decision. Dani Rodrik formalized the economic problem in his famous trilemma. Deep international integration, national sovereignty, and democratic politics cannot all be maximized at once; hyper-globalization inevitably requires something to retreat. In the model of recent decades, a substantial share of national decision-making space was subordinated to the demands of economic integration.

Then came Covid, war, energy dependence, industrial competition, and the vulnerability of global supply chains. In only a few years, the Western vocabulary filled again with reshoring, economic security, strategic autonomy, national production. A semiconductor now has a homeland. A refinery has a geopolitics. Even a container can become a security issue.

For a time, immigration remained the last great exception. Here friction still appeared morally suspect. It is a remarkable oddity. If human beings possess a value incomparably greater than that of goods, their movement should require more politics, more prudence, more judgment about consequences. We did almost the opposite.

Who has the right to enter the “we”?

Michael Walzer begins from a very different point than Carens. Before asking how wealth, security, education, or power should be distributed, he writes in Spheres of Justice, we must confront an earlier good: “membership in some human community.” Membership then structures the other distributions because it establishes with whom we make decisions, from whom we demand obedience, whom we tax, and toward whom we assume obligations.

That observation already contains a theory of the border. Consider the European welfare state. A worker in Turin helps finance a school he will never enter, an operation for someone he will never meet, the pension of an elderly person he may have seen once on a bus. Such a system requires an extraordinary degree of impersonal trust. It works because millions of strangers agree to regard one another as members of a community of obligations.

Legal citizenship helps build that trust. History, language, institutions, and shared memory do the rest. The border marks the space in which that solidarity takes political form.

David Miller brought this line of reasoning into contemporary political theory of migration. While acknowledging responsibilities owed by rich countries to the poor and particular obligations toward those in need of protection, he rejects the existence of a general right to immigrate. For Miller, control over admission belongs to the capacity of a political community to determine itself.

At this point the dispute with Carens becomes much more serious than the usual choice between kindness and severity. Carens looks at the border from the moral equality of the individual who wishes to cross it. Walzer and Miller also look at the community waiting on the other side. Both perspectives see real human beings. One adds a question that universalism tends to compress: who may decide the composition of the community that will then have to govern itself together?

Gregory Conti addressed precisely this point in Compact in “Immigration as a Constitutional Issue,” arguing that immigration and naturalization have an almost constitutional character. In a democracy, the people choose their rulers; a policy capable of changing the composition of the citizen body over time affects the very subject that will exercise sovereignty. Hence Conti’s provocation: major immigration choices should be treated with instruments closer to constitutional politics and direct democracy.

One need not follow him all the way to a referendum. The question remains. A decision on a tax rate changes what a people will do. A decision on citizenship helps determine who that people will be.

This is why the border is the first institution of politics. Before laws there is a space in which those laws have authority; before representation there is a demos that can be represented.

Immigrationism needed to make this question embarrassing. A community that claimed the right to choose who might enter was easily forced to prove its moral innocence. The center of the frame shifted toward the right, need, or aspiration of the person arriving; the interests of those who already lived in the country acquired a faintly suspicious tone.

Yet that person exists too. He lives in a neighborhood, competes for housing, sends a child to school, works in a local labor market. He may be generous, wary, enthusiastic, or afraid. In a democracy he possesses, above all, a title that no theory of openness should erase: he participates in governing the community in which the consequences of those decisions will become concrete.

Robert Putnam showed how delicate this subject is. In his famous E Pluribus Unum, he found that in the short run greater ethnic diversity in the United States was associated with lower trust and social capital: people tended to “hunker down,” reducing even their trust in members of their own group. The second half of the argument is quoted much less often. Putnam also regarded immigration as capable of producing substantial long-term benefits and pointed to new shared identities and common institutions as the means through which immigrant societies had historically overcome that fragmentation.

This is assimilation without adjectives. A society can incorporate enormous differences. It needs something strong enough to turn strangers, gradually, into fellow citizens. And it needs time.

In “The Case for Working-Class Nationalism,” Alex Hogan recovered in Compact an American scene from 1935 that says more than many conferences on integration. In Homestead, Pennsylvania, four thousand steel and coal workers marched carrying American flags; Slovak, Lithuanian, Italian, and heavily accented English could be heard in the crowd. Industrialists had long exploited those ethnic divisions to weaken labor organization. The slowdown of immigration after the First World War and the restrictions of 1924 helped, together with the institutions of organized labor and New Deal politics, create the conditions for a new American working-class identity that cut across older affiliations.

No one should import the racial legislation of 1920s America into the Europe of 2026. History does, however, hand us a variable almost expelled from the contemporary debate: pace.

Assimilation does not depend only on the willingness of the newcomer. It also depends on the receiving society’s capacity to absorb, transmit, transform, and eventually produce a new belonging. A community incapable of asking anything of those who enter reveals a weakness that predates immigration: it has probably begun to doubt that its own culture still contains anything worth inheriting.

The class that could afford to live without borders

There is a reason Lasch becomes useful again. Globalization did not distribute mobility evenly. Those with education, capital, professional networks, and portable skills can change city, country, company, sometimes continent, and turn that mobility into an advantage. Place weighs much less heavily on their lives.

Others remain. The school is still the one down the road. The hospital is the provincial one. The value of the apartment depends on what happens within three streets. The wage is negotiated inside a concrete labor market.

The cosmopolitanism of the elites described by Lasch contains this asymmetry as well: those who benefited most from the globalized world were able to experience place as a choice, while a substantial part of the population continued to experience it as fate.

Deneen places the same fracture inside the post-liberal critique: a new aristocracy selected through education and mobility is able to turn deracination into opportunity while the local institutions on which others depend grow weaker.

This is where immigration and the social question meet. The Congressional Budget Office offers an American picture sophisticated enough to irritate both sides. According to its projections, the large immigration surge that began in 2021 raises cumulative U.S. nominal GDP by $8.9 trillion between 2024 and 2034 and significantly improves the federal budget outlook. At the same time, through 2026 it slows wage growth for U.S. residents with twelve years of education or less because the supply of workers with similar skills rises. Over the longer run, CBO projects that productivity effects reverse that pressure.

All of these conclusions can coexist in the same report because the economy is not a referendum. The country becomes richer in the aggregate while some workers pass through a period in which their bargaining power declines. The federal government may collect more revenue while some state and local governments bear higher costs for schools, housing, and other services. GDP records the aggregate; politics encounters the distribution.

Part of the economic right took a long time to notice. Part of the left, which had built an entire political tradition around conflict between capital and labor, showed curiously little difficulty accepting an expansion of labor supply when immigration was producing it.

The British Labour government is now saying almost exactly what that left might have said twenty years ago. The continuous importation of workers can allow firms to postpone investment in domestic training, wages, and productivity. Its white paper therefore aims to prevent economic sectors from using immigration structurally in place of developing the British workforce.

In the United States, American Compass has built an entire conservative agenda around tight labor markets: restricting labor supply can strengthen the bargaining position of lower-paid workers and force firms to compete through better pay and conditions as well.

Even the civil war inside the new tech right eventually reached this point. When Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley figures defended high-skilled immigration through H-1B visas, Compact, in “The False Promise of High-Skilled Immigration,” argued that a permanent supply of imported skills could subject the professional middle class to the same competitive pressure that parts of the working class had already experienced through globalization and lower-skilled immigration.

Patrick Deneen identified a deeper philosophical fracture in that dispute: populist conservatism emphasizes borders, national production, and social continuity; technological libertarianism remains drawn to the global circulation of talent and to permanent transformation.

Here the word post-liberal finally begins to mean something. Immigration policy ceases to function automatically as an answer to needs expressed by the market. If an industry declares that it needs one hundred thousand workers, that claim enters the balance of national interests alongside wages, productivity, birth rates, training, the absorptive capacity of communities, and industrial strategy.

The National Conservatism Statement of Principles says this with unusual clarity: Western nations have benefited, at different moments, from both liberal immigration policies and periods of restriction; its stated goal is to move toward policies that are more balanced, productive, and assimilationist.

Immigration thus returns to being an instrument of national policy. That formula matters more than any quota, because an instrument has no moral direction of its own.

When even liberals build the fortress

And so we return to Ceuta.

Leo Greenberg called this new posture among part of the European establishment “Fortress Liberalism” in Compact. His insight matters precisely because it complicates the right’s triumphalist story: European liberals are adopting more restrictive immigration tools in part to protect the liberal order from the political backlash produced by mass immigration and the rise of populist parties. The fortress becomes a strategy of survival.

The possibility is perfectly coherent. A government can police a border harshly while continuing to regard the nation as an administrative district. It can demand assimilation to secularism, sexual tolerance, and liberal procedures because it needs to protect the existing order. It can reduce admissions because the polls are becoming dangerous. The barrier exists. The political conception that justifies it may remain exactly what it was before.

For that reason the return of the border opens the battle rather than ending it. Immigrationism has already lost part of its force now that even progressive governments and European institutions have again begun to treat control over admission and the effectiveness of returns as necessary components of a functioning political system. More importantly, it has lost something more valuable: the right to present the continuous increase of mobility as a natural event whose consequences politics could only organize.

What comes next remains unsettled. American data suggest that citizens are already reasoning with categories less primitive than those offered by political polarization. In June 2026, 73 percent of Americans still said immigration was a good thing for the country. A 62 percent majority nevertheless supported maintaining a strong military presence at the border with Mexico, while 52 percent said the Trump administration was going too far on deportations.

Within those three numbers may lie part of the future of Western immigration politics. A society can value immigration and demand control of its border. It can admit and select. It can offer protection to those entitled to it and regard the return of those without a right to remain as indispensable. It can want new citizens and ask them to enter, in a real sense, the political community receiving them.

The old immigrationism needed to compress these distinctions because part of its strength came from moral simplification. Opening meant generosity; limiting easily became a symptom to be explained. The world now taking shape appears less willing to reason in those terms.

This is also where the post-liberal critique must resist being satisfied by the first wall it sees. Carens still forces us to confront the arbitrary fortune of birth. Putnam reminds us that diverse societies can build new solidarities. The American experience shows that an immigrant can enter deeply into a national identity and transmit it to his children. The dignity of someone seeking a better life elsewhere does not disappear because the border has returned.

Post-liberalism adds to that dignity a reality universalism tended to lose from view: historical communities possess the right and the duty to govern their own continuity.

The same idea of national self-government animates the National Conservatism manifesto: independent nations able to determine their own course according to a particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance, and to maintain their own borders.

This is where Fortress Liberalism and a post-liberal politics take different roads. The first has discovered that it needs walls. The second has to remember why the house exists.

At Tarajal, that difference cannot yet be seen. A pneumatic barrier has no political philosophy. It stops a body, marks a space, allows the Guardia Civil to patrol a line. Everything else happens behind it.

There, the question will be whether a nation is merely the place in which certain procedures operate or a community able to recognize a common past, exercise obligations in the present, and choose who will take part in the future. We will have to discuss assimilation again without pronouncing the word apologetically; the labor market without giving employers the right to determine the size of the population; solidarity without forgetting that every politically organized solidarity requires someone capable of saying “we.”

For thirty years, hyper-globalization made circulation into a promise. Obstacles fell and history advanced. Now obstacles are returning. Some will be wrong. Others necessary. Many will arrive late.

The great political question will be which limits are required for a community to remain capable of governing itself, and through which institutions that power should be exercised.

Five hundred meters of rubber float off Ceuta. The old world would have called them a relic. The new one has yet to decide what to make of them.

THE BORDER IS BACK.

Now we have to think seriously about what it contains.

MILITANT.MEDIA

Until a few years ago, “post-liberal” was a word fit for a university seminar - perhaps one with twenty people in the room and as many different definitions of the problem. Today, much less so.

In the United States, Patrick Deneen brought the critique of liberalism out of the academic enclosure with Why Liberalism Failed and then Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. First Things, one of the most influential journals of American religious conservatism, continues to debate openly what it means to move beyond liberalism; this past May, even Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan devoted two days to the “challenges to democratic theory in the post-liberal world,” with an entire session on the critique of the liberal order and a paper by Adrian Pabst tellingly devoted to reclaiming post-liberal thought from anti-liberals. In short, this is no longer a dispute for a handful of American Catholic professors.

Not least because different sensibilities live under the same label. There is Catholic post-liberalism, there is common-good politics, there is national conservatism; on the other side of the Atlantic there are communitarian experiences that were born outside the traditional right altogether. No catechism, then. Rather, a shared unease: the sense that liberalism has ended up asking individual freedom to carry a weight it cannot bear on its own.

A society is not merely the sum of the individuals who inhabit it. A family is not a revocable contract between consumers. A nation is not a hotel where one stays only as long as the service remains satisfactory. And the market, a formidable instrument for producing wealth, becomes a rather questionable master when it also claims the right to decide which industries may disappear, which territories must empty out, how expensive it should be to have a child, and even whether a community still has the right to exist.

R. R. Reno has written that being post-liberal does not necessarily mean becoming anti-liberal: it means, first of all, ceasing to treat liberalism as sufficient to explain the whole of human and political experience. It is a distinction worth holding onto.

Because this is where a vast space opens for the right.

The old liberal conservatism fought only half the battle too many times. It defended the family and then accepted as inevitable an economic order that made building one increasingly difficult; it celebrated communities while watching entire industrial districts hollow out because somewhere an Excel spreadsheet had decided that producing ten thousand kilometers away cost a few cents less.

Something did not add up.

It is no accident that the National Conservatism Statement of Principles defends private property and free enterprise while explicitly stating that the market cannot be absolute and that economic policy must serve the general welfare, productive capacity, and independence of the nation. That is not exactly the language of 1990s free-market orthodoxy.

This is where post-liberalism becomes genuinely interesting for a patriotic, identitarian, and social conservatism. It allows us to speak again of national interest without first asking the market for permission, of work without becoming socialist, of family without confining the question to the culture war. It puts words such as belonging, authority, duty, community, and the common good back into political language - words that for too long seemed like intruders in a vocabulary dominated exclusively by the individual and his rights.

It is a road worth taking.

But there is a fork in it.

Because if liberalism does not exhaust the West, the crisis of the former cannot become the funeral of the latter.

The West, after all, was not born in a meeting room of the European Commission, nor on the banks of the Potomac. We need to go much further back.

To a dusty square in Athens, where free men argue furiously about the city and Socrates spends his time making himself unbearable by asking questions. To Rome, where a paved road disappears beyond the horizon, crossing languages and peoples, while law slowly tries to place something above brute force and citizenship eventually stretches far beyond the walls of the city that invented it.

Then that world really does collapse.

The roads empty. Aqueducts break. Cities that had once stood at the center of the world become inhabited ruins. And yet, behind the walls of some monastery, a man hunched over a sheet of parchment keeps copying words written by other men centuries before. He probably does not think he is “saving the West.” He is doing his work.

More centuries pass. Above low, dirty, noisy cities, bell towers and cathedrals begin to rise. Universities, communes, and guilds emerge; students and masters cross a continent in which languages and sovereigns change but the sense of belonging to the same civilizational space does not. Christianity gathered the Greek and Roman inheritance and transformed it, permanently altering the European way of thinking about the person, power, guilt, forgiveness, and human dignity.

The West was already all there, long before Locke.

Then came Humanism, the Enlightenment, the revolutions, liberalism. Enormous chapters in this story, some of them decisive. None large enough to tear out the pages that came before and pretend to have become the whole book.

And yet a substantial part of Western progressivism almost managed to place a copyright on the word West, making it coincide with its own particular interpretation of modernity: the individual progressively liberated from belonging, religion discreetly escorted toward the door, the global market as horizon, ever lighter borders, and rights increasingly separated - with visible irritation - from any discussion of duties.

Then part of the right began to hate all of this.

So far, so good.

The problem began when some started to hate the house in which all of that had taken up residence.

For years, progressives changed the furniture while explaining that the house belonged to them. It would be rather odd to hand them the keys as well simply because we no longer like the furniture.

Conservative post-liberalism should take the house back.

Conserving, after all, does not mean embalming the world in whichever year one happens to prefer and then organizing guided tours. A civilization turned into a museum is already dead, even if it sells a great many tickets. It means understanding what, within what we have received, still generates life and therefore deserves to be carried into the future.

Tolkien understood this better than quite a few political scientists. The Shire is precious because there is something worth crossing Mordor for - and then there must be a home to return to. The journey changes the person who makes it, the world will no longer be the same, but in the end there must still be a home waiting.

Conservatism tends the fire. It does not stand guard over the ashes.

And tending that fire also means having the courage to intervene when something is consuming the house from within. A society in which having a child becomes almost a luxury, work is no longer enough to build a family, and entire territories can be stripped of production, young people, and a future in the name of an efficiency decided elsewhere does not automatically become conservative because it leaves a little less tax to pay. Capital, markets, and enterprise are indispensable to prosperity, but they remain instruments within a national community: when they begin to devour the ends they are supposed to serve, a conservative should notice.

This is where the right can become social without being ashamed of the word, and post-liberal without becoming socialist.

The opposite danger appears when rejection of the degenerations of the contemporary West turns into fascination with the West’s rivals.

It is already happening in parts of the European and American right. Putin becomes almost a guardian of tradition because he fights Western progressivism; Xi begins to acquire an allure because China does not seem afflicted by the cultural neuroses of our elites. Other authoritarian models end up looking desirable simply because “certain things do not happen there.”

It is a mirage.

Moscow does not become Rome because it fights Brussels. Beijing does not turn into Athens because it has no wokism. The enemy of Western progressivism can perfectly well also be the enemy of the West.

One does not even need to leave the new international conservatism to understand this. The National Conservatism Statement of Principles explicitly declares itself Western and, at the same time that it challenges globalism and the transfer of sovereignty to supranational bodies, condemns the imperialism of Russia and China.

This distinction is fundamental, especially for Europe.

A post-liberal right has no reason to defend this European Union as the terminal point of the continent’s history. The Europe worth recovering is almost the opposite of the dream of a technocratic and bureaucratic superstate in which nations with centuries - sometimes millennia - of history must slowly become administrative districts of a center that claims the right to standardize their politics, culture, and even sensibilities.

The alternative, however, is not a continent reduced to twenty-seven solitudes that meet every so often for a photograph.

Europe can become stronger precisely by conceiving itself again as a confederation of sovereign nations, politically capable of acting when shared interests and a common civilization require it, without pretending that Italians, French, Poles, Hungarians, or Spaniards must gradually become a little less themselves.

After all, Europe existed when Brussels was merely a city.

It existed in pilgrims crossing frontiers long before Schengen, in medieval universities where students and masters traveled from one end of the continent to the other, in merchants’ routes, abbeys, and cathedrals whose stone and language changed but whose civilization did not. It existed even while its peoples were making war on one another, because it is perfectly possible to hate each other ferociously and still know that you belong to the same story.

This Europe comes before any treaty.

And it is precisely such an idea of the continent that also makes possible a mature Atlanticism, very different from automatic obedience to Washington.

The United States is not merely a superpower with which it is useful to maintain good relations. It is also a piece of Europe that crossed the ocean, encountered a new continent, and built something that was no longer European without ceasing to belong to the same great genealogy.

The American founding brought together English common law, republicanism, biblical culture, and European political thought. The Declaration of Independence speaks of men created equal and of unalienable rights endowed by their Creator; the Constitution and the Bill of Rights then gave institutional form to a political experiment that would profoundly shape the history of the entire West.

And then came the twentieth century.

Nations do not, of course, go to war for poetry, and the United States has always had strategic interests to defend, like everyone else. But one image is difficult to erase: twice in the first half of the century, hundreds of thousands and then millions of Americans crossed the Atlantic toward a continent from which many of their fathers and grandfathers had departed. In 1944, on the beaches of Normandy, 73,000 Americans were among roughly 160,000 Allied troops who landed on D-Day; by the end of the war, more than three million U.S. Army personnel were present in the European theater. After the rubble came the Marshall Plan and a decisive American commitment to the reconstruction of Western Europe.

Europe and America are not the same thing.

They are relatives.

And it is this civilizational kinship, even before geopolitical interests and military alliances, that gives Atlanticism its deeper meaning. Washington can be debated. Its choices can be criticized. Europe can be expected to assume responsibilities it has too comfortably delegated to the Americans for decades. But it would be peculiar to fight globalism by proclaiming the return of history and then forget the very history that binds the two shores of the Atlantic.

The knot of conservative post-liberalism lies here. Liberalism is not the terminal point of Western history and should not continue behaving as if it were. Individual liberty and the market are not enough to hold a civilization together; roots, family, duties, legitimate authority, community, work, production, national belonging, and the spiritual dimension are also necessary - the dimension a society can pretend to have outgrown only until the moment it discovers it no longer knows what it should live for.

But those political liberties, the dignity of the person, and the placing of limits on power are not the private property of contemporary liberalism either. Their roots reach much further back.

The world now arriving already seems less willing to treat the old liberal consensus as untouchable. The very fact that in 2026 post-liberalism is being discussed from American conservative journals to European universities shows, at the very least, that the question has moved beyond the margins.

For the right, this can be a great opportunity - perhaps one of the most important of the past few decades.

Provided it knows where it is going.

A patriotic, identitarian, and social conservatism does not need to go back in time, nor does it need to look for adoptive fathers among other people’s autocracies. It must take an ancient civilization, free it from the ideological encrustations of the latest season, and carry it back into a new world.

Artificial intelligence is still discussed primarily as a technology.

How productive will it be? How many jobs will it replace? How much will GDP grow? Which companies will win? How quickly will more powerful models arrive?

That may be the wrong way to frame the question.

Because a technology capable of intervening in the way we search for information, write, translate, study, work, remember, and interpret reality quickly ceases to be merely a tool.

It becomes cognitive infrastructure.

And once an infrastructure becomes essential, the decisive question is no longer only what it can do.

It is who governs it.

A few weeks ago, in mid-July, Compact pushed to its logical conclusion a position that remains relatively marginal within the Western right. In his essay The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here, Gregory Conti argues that the problem is not merely preventing the catastrophic scenarios associated with some future artificial intelligence. Cultural, political, and anthropological reasons already exist, he claims, to resist the spread of generative AI as we know it today.

It is a radical conclusion.

We are not certain it is ours.

But the question that comes before it is much harder to dismiss.

Does a civilization still exercise sovereignty over itself when it delegates an ever-growing share of the processes through which it understands the world to a handful of privately controlled machines?

The machine speaks

The first battle concerns what appears most harmless.

A question.

We type something into a box and a machine answers.

We have already normalized it.

But the answer does not come from nowhere.

Every model is the product of data, selection, training, instructions, filters, human evaluations, corporate policies, and decisions about what should be encouraged, avoided, explored, or refused.

One does not need a conspiracy theory about “AI bias” to recognize the problem.

Anthropic, one of the leading companies in the field, openly studies the values expressed by its models. In July 2026, it published research showing that Claude displays different value profiles across models and languages, even after controlling for topic, task, and the values expressed by users.

This is inevitable.

There is no perfectly neutral answer to questions about family, authority, identity, freedom, sacrifice, religion, justice, or the common good.

But from this obvious fact emerges a much larger question.

For most of digital history, the battle over freedom of expression has focused on the ability to publish.

Who is allowed to speak?

Who can be removed?

Which content can be censored?

In the age of artificial intelligence, another battle may come before all of these:

who decides what deserves to be found, summarized, remembered, and presented as plausible?

Freedom of speech in the twentieth century was primarily about the right to speak.

Freedom in the twenty-first may also concern the right not to have an invisible machine standing between us and what we are able to know, say, and remember.

This is the first dimension of cognitive sovereignty.

The machine watches

There is another freedom we came to regard as almost natural in the early internet: the ability to separate, at least partially, our identity from our words.

Pseudonyms.

Separate accounts.

Different communities.

A certain possibility of disappearing into the crowd.

That condition may prove far less stable than we imagine.

In February 2026, a group of researchers demonstrated how agents powered by large language models can compare enormous quantities of unstructured text and link pseudonymous identities across different platforms. In the published benchmarks, LLM-based systems reached up to 68 percent recall at 90 percent precision, substantially outperforming the traditional methods examined by the researchers.

Their conclusion is cautious but important: the practical obscurity that has until now protected many pseudonymous users online can no longer be taken for granted.

That does not mean every anonymous account will automatically be identified tomorrow.

It means the cost of surveillance changes dramatically.

What once required hours of human investigation may become an automated process performed at enormous scale.

And that changes the political meaning of anonymity.

A democracy in which every word expressed inside a digital community can easily be linked back to the same person, aggregated with their other opinions, and automatically analyzed is not simply a more efficient version of the previous internet.

It is something different.

The formal freedom to speak may survive.

The material ability to exercise that freedom without pervasive consequences may shrink.

And when the social cost of expression rises, censorship no longer always requires a censor.

The knowledge that one is being watched may be enough.

The machine works

But freedom of expression is only the beginning.

The companies building artificial intelligence do not describe what they are creating as a slightly better version of software.

OpenAI continues to define AGI as highly autonomous systems capable of outperforming humans at most economically valuable work.

Anthropic has said it expects “powerful AI” possibly as soon as late 2026 or early 2027, with intellectual capabilities comparable to or exceeding those of top human experts across many disciplines and the ability to operate autonomously through the digital interfaces used by workers today.

The timelines may be wrong.

The most radical predictions may never materialize.

The history of technology is full of exaggerated promises.

But when the people investing hundreds of billions of dollars into building these systems organize their companies and strategies around the possibility that such a transformation may be close, politics cannot afford to dismiss it as science fiction.

The usual question is:

How many jobs will artificial intelligence replace?

That may not yet be the decisive question.

The more unsettling one is:

What happens to citizenship when a substantial share of citizens is no longer necessary to the economic production of the nation?

After the proletariat

Industrial capitalism produced enormous conflicts.

But even in its most brutal form, a fundamental relationship existed between capital and labor.

The worker could be exploited precisely because he was necessary.

His labor produced something capital wanted.

From that necessity emerged political organization, representation, trade unions, social rights, welfare, and a considerable part of modern democracy.

The citizen of industrial democracies was not merely an abstract bearer of rights.

He worked.

He produced.

He paid taxes.

He consumed.

He created wealth.

He formed families.

In extreme circumstances, he could be called upon to defend the political community itself.

Power needed him.

And that need constituted, at least in part, a form of bargaining power.

But what happens if that relationship changes?

The proletarian could be exploited because his labor was necessary. What happens when the citizen is no longer necessary at all?

This is the most provocative point raised by Conti in Compact. If artificial systems and advanced automation were to drastically reduce the need for human labor, a population could emerge that retains formal political rights while progressively losing its economic function within society.

It would be something different from the proletariat.

A superfluous underclass.

Not necessarily poor in the traditional sense.

It might receive transfers, services, universal income, entertainment, and goods at increasingly low cost.

But it would be structurally dependent on a productive system in which it participates less and less.

And this is where the economic question immediately becomes political.

When power no longer needs the citizen

Liberal democracies developed alongside a particular relationship between the state, the economy, and the population.

Power needed taxpayers.

It needed workers.

It needed soldiers.

It needed producers.

Ultimately, it needed the cooperation of millions of people.

This is not a complete explanation of democracy.

But it is part of its material infrastructure.

Now imagine a society in which an increasing share of economic production depends on computational capital, energy infrastructure, robotics, and artificial intelligence systems controlled by a relatively small number of actors.

The citizen would still, of course, possess a vote.

But what would remain of his material power?

We do not know whether we will reach that point.

And we do not know how quickly.

But even OpenAI, which presents a profoundly optimistic vision of artificial intelligence, now openly acknowledges that the transition toward more advanced systems raises questions about the concentration of power, the distribution of prosperity, and the need for new institutions.

The issue, then, does not belong only to critics of artificial intelligence.

It is already present in the language of those building it.

OpenAI itself speaks openly about the need for policies capable of addressing a transition toward superintelligence that could transform work, knowledge creation, and the distribution of prosperity.

The question is therefore worth asking without resorting to catastrophism:

Can a democracy remain politically egalitarian inside an economy that becomes radically unequal in the distribution of cognitive and productive capacity?

We do not yet have an answer.

But we may have considerably less time than we think to begin searching for one.

The conservative paradox

This is where the debate becomes particularly interesting for the right.

A substantial part of the new American tech right spent years fighting platform censorship, cancel culture, algorithmic arbitrariness, and the concentration of power inside large digital corporations.

Then a technology arrived that may be far more powerful than those platforms.

And part of that same right embraced acceleration.

More models.

More power.

Fewer rules.

More speed.

Competition with China as the geopolitical justification.

Innovation as a national imperative.

There are serious arguments for this position.

A civilization that unilaterally abandons a strategic technology may simply hand it to its adversaries.

But there is also a contradiction that Compact places brutally on the table.

What, precisely, is conservative about radically transforming the human condition through an experimental technology deployed at the greatest possible speed?

“Move fast and break things” may make sense when what risks being broken is a piece of enterprise software.

It becomes considerably harder to apply when the objects of experimentation are:

Human work.

The ability to think.

Social life.

Anonymity.

Trust.

Our relationship with language.

The very structure of citizenship.

Conservatism is rooted, in part, in skepticism toward the idea that everything capable of transformation ought therefore to be transformed.

Prudence is not immobility.

It is the recognition that institutions, habits, and forms of life contain knowledge no planner possesses in full.

A house can change.

It can acquire another room.

A new roof.

A different kitchen.

It can be altered for decades and remain recognizably the same house.

But burning it down and rebuilding it from the ground up is something else entirely.

The conservative point is not that the new is necessarily bad.

It is that not everything we destroy can be rebuilt.

The temptation of refusal

Conti takes this logic much further.

His conclusion is that the properly conservative response to artificial intelligence should not be to accelerate today while hoping to regulate tomorrow.

It should be refusal.

That position is coherent with his argument.

But we are not certain that it solves the problem.

Artificial intelligence has already acquired strategic, scientific, military, and economic dimensions that make it difficult to imagine any single Western country simply halting its development without simultaneously altering the global balance of power.

And AI may produce enormous benefits.

Scientific research.

Medicine.

Productivity.

Access to knowledge.

New capabilities for individuals and small organizations.

The question therefore cannot be reduced to a choice between technological worship and Luddism.

Militant.Media is interested in the question that comes immediately before it.

Who has the authority to say yes?

Cognitive sovereignty

A political community exercises sovereignty when it retains the capacity to make fundamental decisions about its own future.

We have learned to speak of territorial sovereignty.

Energy sovereignty.

Industrial sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty.

Food sovereignty.

Artificial intelligence may force us to add another category.

Cognitive sovereignty.

The capacity of individuals and communities to retain a meaningful degree of control over the infrastructures through which they know, interpret, and represent the world.

It means asking who controls the models.

Who determines their criteria.

Which values are embedded within them.

Which information can be retrieved.

How identity and anonymity are protected.

Where the data resides.

Who owns computational power.

Which jobs are automated.

Who benefits from productivity.

Who bears the costs of transition.

And above all:

who determines the speed of change.

Because time is a political variable.

A society can absorb enormous transformations if it has enough time to build institutions, norms, habits, and new forms of equilibrium.

It is far less clear that it can do so when an industrial revolution is compressed into the space of a few years.

The question, then, is not only whether artificial intelligence is safe.

It is whether we will retain enough power to decide what “safe” should mean.

Who governs the machine?

Perhaps the great political divide of the artificial intelligence age will not map neatly onto the categories of the twentieth century.

Right and left.

Market and state.

Progressives and conservatives.

It may run through all of them.

On one side, those for whom increased technological capability creates, in itself, a sufficient presumption in favor of deployment.

On the other, those who believe there are goods — autonomy, freedom, dignity, community, human agency, cultural continuity — whose value cannot be measured solely through productivity and growth.

We do not yet know where this line will be drawn.

But we know it is beginning to emerge.

Artificial intelligence promises to distribute extraordinary capabilities.

It may also concentrate unprecedented power.

It could free millions of people from repetitive work.

It could create millions of people for whom the economy no longer knows how to provide a meaningful role.

It could democratize knowledge.

It could become the universal filter through which that knowledge is mediated.

It could enormously expand individual freedom.

It could make technically possible forms of surveillance and conformity unimaginable in the age of social media.

These contradictions remain unresolved.

And precisely for that reason, the answer cannot be left exclusively to the engineers who build the models, the investors who finance them, or the regulators who arrive afterward.

A civilization must be able to debate democratically the technology that may transform it before that transformation becomes irreversible.

This may be the essential political question of the age of artificial intelligence.

Not:

How intelligent will the machine become?

But:

Who will govern the machine when the machine begins to govern an ever-growing part of our world?

Further reading

We do not necessarily share Gregory Conti’s conclusion.

But we believe the question he raises deserves to be confronted in full.

If conservatism exists, in part, to preserve the conditions under which human beings can remain free, responsible, and at home in their own society, what should it do when technological progress itself begins to transform those conditions?

Gregory Conti, “The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here,” Compact, July 13, 2026.

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-ai-apocalypse-is-already-here

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