Why Liberalism Failed Read online

  WHY LIBERALISM FAILED

  Published with the assistance of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia.

  Copyright © 2018 by Patrick J. Deneen.

  All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937443

  ISBN 978-0-300-22344-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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  To Inge

  The gap between medieval Christianity’s ruling principle and everyday life is the great pitfall of the Middle Ages. It is the problem that runs through Gibbon’s history, which he dealt with by a delicately malicious levity, pricking at every turn what seemed to him the hypocrisy of the Christian ideal as opposed to natural human functioning. . . .

  Chivalry, the dominant idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.

  —BARBARA TUCHMAN, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

  Contents

  Foreword James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: The End of Liberalism

  ONE. Unsustainable Liberalism

  TWO. Uniting Individualism and Statism

  THREE. Liberalism as Anticulture

  FOUR. Technology and the Loss of Liberty

  FIVE. Liberalism against Liberal Arts

  SIX. The New Aristocracy

  SEVEN. The Degradation of Citizenship

  Conclusion: Liberty after Liberalism

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Foreword

  The Yale University Press series Politics and Culture begins with the premise that self-government, the hallmark and glory of the United States, the West, and an expanding number of countries around the world, is ailing. Those who sense the ailment cannot agree on what it is, much less how it is to be treated; and that disagreement, only deepening as time passes, is in fact part of the ailment. In the young twenty-first century, liberal democracy, that system that marries majority rule with individual rights, has entered a crisis of legitimacy. As practiced in recent decades, and as an international ordering principle, it has failed to deliver on its promises to growing, and increasingly mobilized and vocal, numbers of people.

  The symptoms of this ailment are easy to observe: an increasing skew in the distribution of wealth; decay in traditional institutions, from civic associations to labor unions to the family; a loss of trust in authority—political, religious, scien-tific, journalistic—and among citizens themselves; growing disillusionment with progress in effecting equal justice for all; above all, perhaps, the persistent and widening polarization between those who want increasingly open and experimental societies and those who want to conserve various traditional institutions and practices. The fragmentation not only continues but deepens. As people sort into new social and political tribes, electoral results confound and alarm experts and further widen polarization. W. B. Yeats’s line “the center cannot hold” applies in our fractured societies as much as it did when he wrote it a century ago. In the age of Trump, it is not even clear where the center is or how we might rediscover and reoccupy it.

  Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, the second book in this series, locates the source of the legitimacy crisis in liberalism itself. By liberalism, Deneen has in mind not the narrow definition of popular American discourse, namely progressive big government or caring government (depending on your point of view). He means the broader conception familiar to political philosophers, the set of principles upon which liberal democracies the world over are built. Why Liberalism Failed pulls together a number of strands of discontent about liberalism today, strands found in academic, political, and popular discourse. The result is a bold and far-reaching critique of the root liberal assumption, associated with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, of individual autonomy. We use the “root” metaphor deliberately: Deneen’s is a radical critique, arguing that liberalism needs not reform but retirement. The problem is not that liberalism has been hijacked but that its elevation of individual autonomy was wrong from the start, and the passage of decades has only made its error more evident.

  Scholars have launched radical critiques of liberalism before. From the left have come broadsides from Marx and his progeny, including the Frankfurt School, and from postmodern thinkers such as Foucault. From the right have come attacks from Nietzsche, Schmitt, and traditionalists in the Catholic Church and other religious institutions. From a location difficult to pinpoint have come onslaughts from Milbank and Hauerwas. Such critiques inevitably provoke strong reactions from other scholars and intellectuals. Radical critiques are designed to do that—to disrupt the dominant discourse and challenge its routine absorption and redirection of critique, so that people will think more fundamentally about existing political, social, and economic institutions and practices.

  Readers of all sorts will find that Why Liberalism Failed challenges not only their thinking but many of their most cherished assumptions about politics and our political order. Deneen’s book is disruptive not only for the way it links social maladies to liberalism’s first principles, but also because it is difficult to categorize along our conventional left-right spectrum. Much of what he writes will cheer social democrats and anger free-market advocates; much else will hearten traditionalists and alienate social progressives. Some of these readers nonetheless will be tempted to place the book in one or another familiar category, the better to manage and perhaps dismiss its critique. They should resist that temptation, which is itself a symptom of our polarized times and perhaps the chief reason why Deneen’s argument is precisely the kind we most need to hear now.

  James Davison Hunter

  and John M. Owen IV, Series Editors

  Preface

  This book was completed three weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Its main arguments matured over the past decade, before Brexit or President Trump was even conceivable. My basic assumption was that the underpinnings of our inherited civilized order—norms learned in families, in communities, through religion and a supporting culture—would inevitably erode under the inf
luence of the liberal social and political state. But I anticipated that liberalism would relentlessly continue replacing traditional cultural norms and practices with statist Band-Aids, even as a growing crisis of legitimacy would force its proponents to impose liberal ideology upon an increasingly recalcitrant populace. Liberalism would thus simultaneously “prevail” and fail by becoming more nakedly itself.

  From that vantage, I hinted that such a political condition was ultimately untenable, and that the likely popular reaction to an increasingly oppressive liberal order might be forms of authoritarian illiberalism that would promise citizens power over those forces that no longer seemed under their control: government, economy, and the dissolution of social norms and unsettled ways of life. For liberals, this would prove the need for tighter enforcement of a liberal regime, but they would be blind to how this crisis of legitimacy had been created by liberalism itself. I did not suggest these conclusions expecting to see such a dynamic come to pass in my lifetime, and might have written a somewhat different book in light of recent events. However, I believe my original analysis still helps us understand the basic outlines of our moment, and avoids the excessively narrow focus that can come from too deep an immersion in headlines.

  Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance. The breakdown of family, community, and religious norms and institutions, especially among those benefiting least from liberalism’s advance, has not led liberalism’s discontents to seek a restoration of those norms. That would take effort and sacrifice in a culture that now diminishes the value of both. Rather, many now look to deploy the statist powers of liberalism against its own ruling class. Meanwhile, huge energies are spent in mass protest rather than in self-legislation and deliberation, reflecting less a renewal of democratic governance than political fury and despair. Liberalism created the conditions, and the tools, for the ascent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge to understand its own culpability.

  While I end this volume by calling on political philosophers for help in finding a way out of the vise in which we now find ourselves—the mental grip of those revolutionary ideologies inaugurated in modernity first by liberalism itself—the better course lies not in any political revolution but in the patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order. As the Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote in “The Power of the Powerless”: “A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.”1 Only a politics grounded in the experience of a polis—lives shared with a sense of common purpose, with obligations and gratitude arising from sorrows, hopes, and joys lived in generational time, and with the cultivation of capacities of trust and faith—can begin to take the place of our era’s distrust, estrangement, hostility, and hatreds. As my teacher and friend Carey McWilliams wrote at the conclusion of one of his most penetrating essays, “strengthening [our shared] democratic life is a difficult, even daunting, task requiring sacrifice and patience more than dazzling exploits.”2 Sacrifice and patience are not the hallmarks of the age of statist individualism. But they will be needed in abundance for us to usher in a better, doubtless very different, time after liberalism.

  Acknowledgments

  This short book was written in a brief span—after several decades of reflection. My debts are therefore many, and in some cases the acknowledgment of my gratitude is long overdue.

  The unpayable debts to the late Wilson Carey McWilliams, my friend and teacher, should be everywhere in evidence on these pages. He would have written a much better book on the travails of liberalism, but I would trade such a book for just one more conversation on the state of the world between sips of bourbon and laughter.

  The first ideas of this book were conceived at Rutgers and Princeton, and I am thankful for generous interlocutors like George Kateb, Robert P. George, and the late Paul Sigmund. I am grateful to the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, and its associate director Brad Wilson, for a timely fellowship during 2008–9.

  Many of these ideas matured during my years at Georgetown University. I am indebted to Joshua Mitchell, Father James V. Schall, S.J., Father Stephen Fields, S.J., and two departed friends, Jean Bethke Elshtain and George Carey. I most gratefully acknowledge the friendship and support of Bill Mumma. I remain in awe of the many students who together made the Tocqueville Forum so special during its most glorious years.

  At Notre Dame, our lives have been suffused with sustaining friendships. My gratitude to Phillip Muñoz, Susan Collins, John O’Callaghan, Sean and Christel Kelsey, Dave O’Connor, Philip Bess, John and Alicia Nagy, Francesca Murphy, John Betz, John Cavadini, Gerard Bradley, Rick and Nicole Garnett, Jeff Pojanowski, Martijn Cremers, Father Bill Miscamble, David Solomon, Carter Snead, Gladden Pappin, Dan Philpott, Mike Griffin, Anna and Michael Moreland, and Brad Gregory. I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of two vital programs at the University of Notre Dame, the Center for Ethics and Culture and the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life, both which supported completion of this book. My thanks also to Mimi Teixeira, who assisted with preparation of the manuscript.

  More friends than I can possibly acknowledge have helped me in countless ways, and I hope you find fruits of our conversations here, along with my deepest gratitude. My thanks to Chad Pecknold, Francis X. Maier, Rod Dreher, Bill McClay, Jeremy Beer (who suggested a version of the title), Mark Henrie, Jason Peters, Jeff Polet, Mark Mitchell, Brad Birzer, Phillip Blond, Cindy Searcy, Dan Mahoney, John Seery, Susan McWilliams, Brad Klingele, and Michael Hanby. I am grateful to Rusty Reno, David Mills, Dan McCarthy, John Leo, and Scott Stephens for publishing several early versions of parts of these chapters. I especially thank Steve Wrinn for his wise counsel and friendship over so many years.

  I’m grateful to the Institute for the Advanced Studies on Culture at the University of Virginia, particularly James Davison Hunter and John Owen IV, who expressed early interest in this project. My thanks to Bill Frucht, who urged me to write short and so gamely championed the book at Yale University Press.

  Shortly before the book went to press, two friends of long standing passed away, Benjamin Barber and Peter Lawler. I would that my teacher Ben and my valued interlocutor and friend Peter might have been able to read some fruits of our many conversations and debates. Their voices and ideas are here, and remain too in the many lives they touched. But still, I miss them both.

  To my wife, Inge, and our children Francis, Adrian, and Alexandra, my heart is full and words fail.

  And because so many years have passed since the intimations of this project began whispering to me, doubtless there are many owed my thanks whom I haven’t named here. You know who you are. My deepest and abiding gratitude.

  WHY LIBERALISM FAILED

  Introduction: The End of Liberalism

  A political philosophy conceived some 500 years ago, and put into effect at the birth of the United States nearly 250 years later, was a wager that political society could be grounded on a different footing. It conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life. Opportunities for liberty were best afforded by a limited government devoted to “securing rights,” along with a free-market economic system that gave space for individual initiative and ambition. Political legitimacy was grounded on a shared belief in an originating “social contract” to which even newcomers could subscribe, ratified continuously by free and fair elections of responsive representatives. Limited but effective government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections were some of the hallmarks of this ascendant order and, by all ev
idence, wildly successful wager.

  Today, some 70 percent of Americans believe that their country is moving in the wrong direction, and half the country thinks its best days are behind it. Most believe that their children will be less prosperous and have fewer opportunities than previous generations. Every institution of government shows declining levels of public trust by the citizenry, and deep cynicism toward politics is reflected in an uprising on all sides of the political spectrum against political and economic elites. Elections, once regarded as well-orchestrated performances meant to convey legitimacy to liberal democracy, are increasingly regarded as evidence of an impregnably rigged and corrupt system. It is evident to all that the political system is broken and social fabric is fraying, particularly as a growing gap increases between wealthy haves and left-behind have-nots, a hostile divide widens between faithful and secular peoples, and deep disagreement persists over America’s role in the world. Wealthy Americans continue to gravitate to gated enclaves in and around select cities, while growing numbers of Christians compare our times to that of the late Roman Empire and ponder a fundamental withdrawal from wider American society into updated forms of Benedictine monastic communities. The signs of the times suggest that much is wrong with America. A growing chorus of voices even warn that we may be witnessing the end of the Republic unfolding before our eyes, with some yet-unnamed regime in the midst of taking its place.

  Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered. The liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrollable power, one that only extends their sense of powerlessness by relentlessly advancing the project of “globalization.” The only rights that seem secure today belong to those with sufficient wealth and position to protect them, and their autonomy—including rights of property, the franchise and its concomitant control over representative institutions, religious liberty, free speech, and security in one’s papers and abode—is increasingly compromised by legal intent or technological fait accompli. The economy favors a new “meritocracy” that perpetuates its advantages through generational succession, shored up by an educational system that relentlessly sifts winners from losers. A growing distance between liberalism’s claims and its actuality increasingly spurs doubts about those claims rather than engendering trust that the gap will be narrowed.