Michael R. Strain

With both the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and more genteel post-liberal commentators calling for their own religious views to be imposed on others, traditional conservatives and Christians — particularly Catholics — must speak up. The state has no business using coercion in matters of conscience, as the Catholic Church itself has long made clear.

My Project Syndicate column. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/christians-conservatives-versus-american-taliban-post-liberals-by-michael-r-strain-2026-02?

Christians vs. America’s Taliban Michael R. Strain explains why any serious conservative should reject the post-liberal far right's push for theocratic government.

The “permanent problem” for man, John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, is not the struggle for subsistence. It is “how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” Post-liberal commentators think that democratic capitalism has failed on this score. But Keynes made a crucial conceptual error by assuming that the struggle for subsistence precedes the struggle to live well. My latest Project Syndicate column uses Brink Lindsey's important new book to critique the post-liberal critique.

Is Affluence a Barrier to Living Well? Michael R. Strain thinks the struggle for subsistence and the struggle to flourish occurs simultaneously.