Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama (1992) famously framed the victory of liberalism and its universal acceptance as ‘the end of history’. To the extent that this sentiment has, of late, lost its grip on the popular imagination so that ‘the end of history’ has itself come to an end, we have been entering a postliberal world. This postliberal condition of Brexit, Trumpism and the expansion of right populisms throughout Euro-America and beyond has brought about a profound anthropological nervousness. How to explain this sense of disciplinary crisis? Why bother to proclaim that ‘how we respond to this challenge will define the future of our discipline’ (Bessire and Bond 2017: np)? In short: why do these postliberal projects seemingly go to the heart of the anthropological project itself?In a recent article, Mazzarella (2019) unearths some of the reasons for this deep postliberal provocation. In line with the diagnostic proposed here of anthropology as a discipline of postliberal critique, he argues that ‘anthropology itself, methodologically if not always ideologically, tends towards a populist stance habitually aligning with the common sense of the common people’ (2019: 46). What makes the current right-populist provocation so hard to swallow for anthropology is thus the fact that this provocation seems both in alignment with anthropology’s own postliberal critique and in conflict with anthropology’s own ‘vague, generic liberalism’ (2019: 48). Right populism so profoundly challenges anthropology because it seems to use many of anthropology’s own arguments; the postliberalisms of right populism and anthropology seemingly coalesce and are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Or, rather, anthropology might have, for too long, not invested enough energy and care in sufficiently distinguishing its own brand of postliberalism from potentially harmful other variants.That anthropology could afford to do so is arguably due to two common forms of de facto duplicity. First, preferably studying ‘good’ subaltern groupings (people who anthropologists ‘overtly liked and favoured politically’ (Don Kalb, this issue)), it has been relatively easy to advocate, and engage in, a morally and politically unproblematic collaborative anthropology of scholar–informant solidarity (see Lassiter 2005, but also Teitelbaum 2019), making it unnecessary to explicitly spell out, and defend, the values underpinning the postliberal project of both scholars and informants. Second, moral-political compartmentalisation might also have played some role: in extending the horizons of tolerance within research contexts sufficiently kept apart from those of the observing anthropologists, the latter might have been in the position to advocate an extensive tolerance for convictions and practices, the practical consequences of which they did not have to bear themselves.