Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press: 2018).
“Liberalism was premised upon the limitation of government and the liberation of the individual from arbitrary political control” (7).
The state becomes the only independent actor under liberalism. That’s because all the people have become individualized: full of rights that they have no power to exercise. And the state meanwhile only responds to the only motivation liberalism understands: greed for money. Thus the greatest oligarchic tyranny ever known is born (7-11).
Institutions are to “equalize respect and dignity accorded to all people, even as those institutions are mills for sifting the economically viable from those who will be mocked for their backward views on trade, immigration, nationhood, and religious beliefs.” Students are to “reinforce their keen outrage over inequality while enjoying its bounteous fruits” (12). We have consigned everyone now to a servile education concerned only with crass money making (13).
Liberalism is making us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone” (16).
Liberalism’s legalism is an attempt to bypass the human element and make things neutral and impartial. This is impossible, though, and so the lawyer and lobbyist emerge as the new arbiters of what is permitted and who benefits.
Liberalism seeks to destroy any obligation not arising from consent. Therefore family, region, race, nationality all have to go (17-19).
Machiavelli marks the first turn from the classical and Christian emphasis on virtue education as a solution to the problems of governing. Rather than straining toward an ideal, we ought to settle for the lowest common denominator and use its flaws against itself. That was much more predictable. Harness the dysfunction, don’t try to eliminate it. “What were viewed as the essential supports for a training in virtue—and hence, preconditions for liberty from tyranny —came to be viewed as sources of oppression, arbitrariness, and limitation.” Descartes and Hobbes said irrational custom was an obstacle to stability (24-25). Strip man of his “accidents” to understand how he should live, they said (26).
The potential for limitless human control of nature and politics required the shelving of ancient Stoic and Christian ideas of acceptance of reality and limits (26).
Problems are always cast as holdovers from insufficiently realized liberalism or things definitely eradicable with the future horizon of further liberalism (28).
Jettisoning virtue gives us unmitigated self-interest plus unprecedented surveillance (29). Liberalism was unwittingly relying on preliberal foundations like social trust and community while simultaneously eroding those things. It cannot replace them (30).
Hobbes formulated that legitimacy derives from choice—relationships and constraints are legitimate insofar as they are chosen and serve self-interest. It is presupposed that humans are chiefly individuals in conflict with other individuals (31-32).
First wave liberalism saw humans as flawed but believed we could be harnessed to promote free market capitalism and thus increase human freedom, productivity and mastery of nature. This was Bacon and Hobbes and Locke (36). Modern day “conservatives”
Second wave liberalism extended the idea that humans could master nature to humans mastering their own nature. Blank slate-ism. Rousseau, Marx, Mill and Dewey among others. Modern day progressives (36-37).
Liberalism destroys social bonds, so increasingly anarchic individuals need recourse to an increasingly large state to enforce social harmony (38). Both “moral self-command” and natural resources are continually depleted by liberalism. It shreds norms to increase human autonomous choice, and it shreds natural resources to ensure limitless economic growth. Its hedonistic inhabitants would revolt if restraint in either realm were advocated (39-41).
Locke said law wasn’t to restrain man, to fit him for self-government, but instead a way to ensure his increased liberty and thus paradoxically make us freer than even the imagined “state of nature” (48-49). Intermediate entities: family, church, culture—have to be streamlined or eliminated to ensure maximal interface with the liberal state. These other things are regarded as unreal: only the individual actually exists (51). But people were actually deliberately trained by state intervention to forget belief in embeddedness, in organic connection and mutual responsibility. The scientific extension of the ideology of market individuality has been relentlessly pushed. (52).
Progressive liberalism’s values: “Through the increasingly massive and all-encompassing Leviathan, we are finally free of one another” (58). Rise of the totalitarian state: “A population seeking to fill the void left by the weakening of more local memberships and associations was susceptible to a fanatical willingness to identify completely with a distant and abstract state” (59). With Nisbet and Tocqueville, Deneen says individualism is not opposite statism but its very cause (61). Classical liberalism (conservatives) only succeeds in advancing economic atomization and progressive liberalism only succeeds in advancing sexual promiscuity (63).
Liberal anticulture invades and replaces the three bases upon which culture rests: nature, time and place (66).
Nature: both Hobbes and Rousseau, for all their disagreements, agree that the state of nature is a culture-less state. Culture is artifice and imposition by tradition and community, so it is not primary (67). The ancients however saw culture as prior to and necessary for any flourishing human personality to develop (68). But under liberalism, “limits upon liberty can arise only from the authority of the consent-based liberal state” (69).
Culture, which before liberalism always was adapted to specific places and landscapes and climates and physical facts, became a target of liberalism. Dewey called such thinking savage and invoked Bacon in his call to master nature. Liberalism conceived of traditional culture and its organic relationship with nature, then, as an obstacle to the conquest of nature (69-72).
Time under liberalism is experienced as “fractured” because of individualism. Culture is how time is experienced: an inheritance from ancestors and a bequest to descendants. Liberalism shrinks this experience to the here and now: when once the past is spurned, the future also becomes someone else’s problem. Responsibility to the past and future is broken. Thus we see the destruction of both previous cultural inheritance and future natural resources under liberalism (72-76).
Place is similarly discarded by liberalism as inessential and replaceable. Thomas Jefferson wrote that liberal human rights begin with the right to leave the place of one’s birth. Choice trumps roots (77-78).
With college culture as with Wall Street and the subprime mortgage crisis, it was the dismantling of local, intimate cultures and norms that led to the appetite-soaked license-fests of both rape culture and the 2008 meltdown. After the fact, leviathan is called in to try to bring order to the chaos by ever growing surveillance and punitive threats (84-88).
“Liberal ‘culture’ is the vacuum that remains when local experience has been eviscerated, memory is lost, and every place becomes every other place” (89).
Technology is no different from magic: wild promises of control and betterment that ultimately come to dominate and control us (91-93).
The more choice we have in technology and the more autonomy it grants us, the more our capacity for self-government and independent forms of community unravel, thus making us less free and more dependent on the technological leviathan. Our enlightenment philosophy of individuality is what predisposed us to this vicious cycle (103-109).
The liberal arts were originally conceived as training in how to use freedom correctly, which was the state of liberty. The great tradition provided the guidance and cautions for how to do this. By the mid twentieth century, the idea of the “multiversity” had been concocted: and now the idea was useful knowledge for the conquest of nature and the extension of human license (112-117).
The postmodern self-immolation of the humanities is a result of the left copying the right: create new knowledge by undercutting and reevaluating the humanities corpus. Everything is now a progressive cutting up of the texts and the ambition to demonstrate some deeper level of deconstruction or skepticism. It advances “human freedom” just the way technology does in their minds (120-121).
[Reference: Ruthellen Josselson: “The Hermeneutics of Faith and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Narrative Inquiry 14, no. 1 (2004): 1-28.]
Postmodernism wants to fight rationalist scientism, but it shares its core definition of human freedom. Both seek to expand raw will and human power over reality by getting rid of anything, be it nature or sexuality itself, that stands in its way (122).
“Human appetite is insatiable and the world is limited,” therefore, “we cannot be truly free in the modern sense” (125).
Liberal arts formerly did not liberate but educated on limits, thus producing wisdom (128).
The new educational system is preparing students for “lives of deracinated vagabondage” (132). They “strip mine” human capital and talent from every corner of the globe and process it for use away from its origin. Thus real communities wither and die and global command centers are transformed into jungles of unintelligible diversity (132). These new elites become globalized narcissists who unabashedly believe in their own “benevolence” (132).
Liberalism just swapped out elite classes: from the old inherited, fixed, martial, and culturally cultivated aristocracy we were given the strivers, the hard-nosed, those inclined to rootlessness, materialism and insensitive to “dislocating social change.” (135) Locke and Jefferson called them more “industrious” and “rational.” (136-7). What’s in it for the lower classes is an overall increase in living standards and the prospect of upward mobility even as inequality actually increases drastically (138).
“Liberal politics was conceived as a defense of [the natural] inequalities [in talent that men possess and their ability to accrue wealth based on these]. Liberalism’s second wave—Progressivism—argued that the rampant inequality that first-wave liberalism so successfully advanced was, in fact, an obstacle to the realization of true selfhood” (142). Both species want to increase individual autonomy from “accidents” of birth: progressivism just thinks economic inequality inhibits that, while classical liberalism thinks state intervention inhibits it.
John Stuart Mill: overthrow “custom” to allow unique elite to live according to personal will (144). To be human was to choose, for Mill (145). From On Liberty.
The “liberalocracy” shears all the traditional supports of family life away so that only Millian (JS Mills) exceptional individuals can thrive. In the resultant social debris, these rising elites can then “purchase” the structural supports that once were provided to all classes through longstanding custom. While the working class drowns in divorce and drugs and instability and absentee family members, liberal aristocrats purchase walkable neighborhoods and lawn service and nannies and daycares and functioning schools that give their families the basic supports that everyone used to have (150-1).
Budding liberalocrats therefore have or be indoctrinated from a young age in worship of diversity and hatred of the unwoke plebs. This distracts and assuages their consciences as they assume their stolen privilege in later years (153).
The elites have demonstrated that when it comes to the crux of the matter the democracy in liberal democracy is the part that may need to go (154-157).
Progressives have schizophrenically promoted more democratization while also neutering it with “objective” professionalization. This reflects liberalism’s fundamental incoherence (158-160). Liberalism created the atomized, selfish, uncivic voter mass that it simultaneously decries (161). And its answer is always more liberalism.
Deneen argues that Madison and the framers wanted a system that “enlarged the orbit,” or extended the political community such that individuals felt isolated and unable to combine into factions. From here elites would spring up in the republican system who could more reasonably secure liberalism against the dangers of mass democracy. They would cipher the polity’s true interests (162-165). This has inexorably led to the sloughing off of local identities and loyalties and the growth of attachment to the center, the federal government, the only entity who can increase the sphere of “personal expressive freedom” (168-172).
Liberalism “combines powerlessness with the illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexuality license” (188).
Liberal erroneous anthropology is based on “the fiction of radically autonomous humans in a State of Nature” (188).
Consent is the fiction that is the sacred cornerstone at the bottom of liberalism. It is regarded today as literally the only untouchable belief (188-9).
Though culture was originally organic and non-voluntarist, after liberalism’s blighted cultural landscape, those in opposition to its anticulture have no choice but to “choose” a new cultural plan (192). This can only be done by being grounded in particular geographies, histories, and peoples (193).