Political philosophers are often remembered for their catchphrases: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’; ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’; ‘Monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’. The catchphrase of Patrick Deneen, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, is: “Liberalism failed – not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.”
By this, he means: the problem isn’t that real liberalism has never been tried, or that liberalism has been unable to defend itself in the face of its enemies. (And to clear up the obvious misconception, ‘liberalism’ here doesn’t just mean the politics of the left of the Democratic Party, but rather the wider ideology of a free society.) Instead, the root of the problem is within liberalism itself. Deneen claims that it is not a self-sustaining political system: liberalism relies upon a pre-liberal inheritance of cultural norms, values, customs and traditions that sustain it, but the energy of the liberal project is devoted to attacking those things. It draws down its reserves of social capital, and doesn’t replenish them.
Why does it do this? For Deneen, it comes back to the meaning of the word ‘freedom’. A free person, in the liberal understanding of freedom, should be subjected to as few external restraints as possible: liberal citizens should be allowed to choose their own destinies. It is the philosophy of individual independence.
But every early liberal thinker knew that, for a liberal society to work, people have to use their freedom responsibly. The liberal citizen has to be, for want of a better word, virtuous: when exercising their freedom, they should have an eye on the consequences for others. They have to be aware that their choices do not take place in a vacuum, but instead in the context of wider society.
Deneen’s argument is that there is a contradiction in liberalism. Liberalism relies on virtue, while simultaneously critiquing it: an expectation of virtue would be precisely the sort of unchosen, illegitimate, external restraint, which the liberal project says is stifling to the individual.
To put it more concretely: Factory-owners who are free to pollute rivers, fathers who are free to abandon their children, may have the right to do so – but it is best for society that they do not. And yet every factory-owner and every father has a little liberal voice whispering in their ear, saying, ‘Do as you want! You are free!’ And it is all too easy for that voice to be unimpeded by a clear understanding of whether it is Good or Bad to pollute rivers or abandon children; and that voice often speaks with the full support of the State, when it decides that its explicit aim is to establish markets that are as free as possible, or when it changes its laws to make divorce as easy as possible.
But in practice, we tolerate neither pollution nor family breakdown, nor their second-order consequences. The State has to step in, setting up ever more powerful environmental agencies and ever more intrusive social service bureaux. Deneen therefore describes a cycle, which works like this: The State makes liberal reforms, and society and culture both liberalise. But citizens do not use their freedom in a way that is beneficial for society; and when the consequences become intolerable, the State has no choice but to act.
This happens in spite of the fact that neither of our political parties want things this way. To put it crudely, today’s ‘Right’ is committed to economic liberalism and often to social conservatism, while the ‘Left’ is committed to both economic statism and social liberalism – but in practice we find ourselves with economically and socially liberal policies, and a large State into the bargain. For whatever reason, the Left has singularly failed to tame capitalism, and the Right has barely tried to prevent the expansion of the permissive society. In Deneen’s telling, the only idea that wins is liberal individualism – and the State.
Deneen’s book was written in 2016, and published in 2018. If it had been written in 2006, and published in 2008, I am sure it wouldn’t have sold so well. But when it came out, for many people, it seemed to provide an explanation of the Trump Moment: as Obama wrote on the blurb, it “offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril.”
Deneen’s ambition, however, is much greater than just explaining why Donald Trump was elected. His book is written as an explanation of the ‘inner logic’ of the liberal order: its intellectual underpinnings, and how it works in practice. His bold claim is that he’s found a contradiction in the liberal regime: liberal society will evolve into a collection of disconnected, hyper-autonomous individuals, who are ruled over by a controlling State. We are heading for a despotism that has clearly evolved from liberalism, but which is liberal in name only.
Because Deneen’s scope is so wide, it can sometimes feel like the term ‘liberalism’ is being used to mean ‘things Patrick Deneen does not like’.
I think that using ‘liberalism’ as a term of art is broadly justifiable. Deneen uses the word ‘liberalism’ both to mean a 400-year-old tradition of extremely diverse political thought, as well as the current conditions that we live in. Doing so is imprecise, but it is hard to be precise, when the target of your critique is so large. This means that Deneen shouldn’t be taken overly-literally: he is not saying that John Locke literally caused all of our current social problems. Nor should the book be taken as trying to determine exact causality: he is writing about politics, not natural science. Instead, his argument is that you can draw a long, meandering, shaky black line, joined by many other lines of different colours of ink, from the thought of Locke, via Rousseau and Mill and Rawls, all the way through to the conditions of today.
It is also important to remember that liberalism’s sins are sometimes acts of commission, and sometimes acts of omission. On the commission side, it would be fair to blame liberalism for modern economic conditions, because capitalism and liberalism are so closely linked that it would be splitting hairs to try to separate them. On the omission side, we could easily ascribe blame for many of the other things that Deneen complains about to the decline of religion, in which liberalism plays a more passive role. Liberalism did not cause us to become atheists, but equally the secular liberal regime has not provided any pushback. Liberalism did not cause the roof to leak, but it isn’t fixing it either.
The point of the book is not a precise intellectual history, nor a precise exploration of modern conditions. It is written in a form of the passive voice: “liberalism does such-and-such” rather than “liberal agents do this”. It is unlikely to convince the extreme sceptic, who wants an exact definition of the causal mechanism. Instead, the point is to explore how modern, liberal society is running itself down.
The liberal regime
Everybody who writes about liberalism has to spend far too long defining what they mean by it. Doing so is notoriously tricky, partly because of the sheer variety of different types of liberalism. An ideology that includes Rousseau and Burke, Hayek and Keynes, and Rawls and Nozick, is a tent so big that it is hard to see what its adherents all have in common.
But liberals have the luxury of not having to nail their colours to the mast, because we live under a liberal regime. Two hundred years ago, liberalism was a radical idea that undermined the rights of kings and aristocrats, which had to be defined in order to be espoused. Today, to a first approximation every politician and every political philosopher in Britain and America is a liberal of some sort. We’re all liberals now, so we don’t need to consider what liberalism means. You don’t need to think too hard about the ideological air you breathe.
As a first pass, the first two sentences of the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, written at a time when liberal principles did need to be explicitly articulated, are as good a definition as any of the core of liberal thought:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Hard to disagree with. But the fact that it is so hard to disagree with these sentences is precisely the point. Liberalism permeates our beliefs to the point that it seems downright bizarre to imagine a world in which those truths were not self-evident. Everybody believes that humans are equal, rights-bearing individuals; everybody believes in limited government whose purpose is to secure those rights; in a State that governs by consent; in liberty. Liberals may vehemently disagree about the practical meaning of ‘equal’, ‘rights’, ‘limited’, ‘consent’ and ‘liberty’, but they all agree that we should strive for those five nouns and adjectives. The political conflict between today’s Left and Right boils down to the definition of liberalism – should equality mean ‘equality of opportunity’ or ‘equality of outcome’? – should we limit the powers of the State to conduct surveillance? – is there a human right to healthcare? – does first-past-the-post deprive government of consent of the governed? – should a person have the liberty to change their legal gender? The exact content of liberalism may be disputed, but all debates are conducted on liberal turf using liberal assumptions. Liberalism is like our mother-tongue: so familiar to us, that it is hard to conceive that there are other ways of doing things.
Patrick Deneen does not argue that these five nouns and adjectives are wrong. Rather, he attacks liberalism for its contradictions, which, in his telling, are ultimately caused by the way in which liberalism changed the meaning of the word ‘liberty’.
We have now forgotten that ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ (I use the words synonymously) once meant something quite different from what it does today. Before liberal thinkers started to change its definition,
Liberty had long been believed to be the condition of self-rule that forestalled tyranny, within both the polity and the individual soul. Liberty was thus thought to involve discipline and training in self-limitation of desires, and corresponding social and political arrangements that sought to inculcate corresponding virtues in the arts of self-government.
In this conception of ‘liberty’, familiar to Greek, Roman and Mediaeval Christian thought, to be free is to be self-restrained. You are not free if you are a slave to your passions: if you cannot stop yourself from drinking and fornicating, then you are controlled by drink and fornication.
Contra Rousseau, man is not born free, in this pre-liberal sense of the word: instead, as far as liberty is concerned, he is born a blank slate. Man has to be made free. To become free, a person has to be trained to govern themself, through education in virtue and self-rule: free human beings must be taught how to act, to restrain themselves, to abnegate their passions, and to sublimate themselves to the common good of society.
Put this way, ‘freedom’ sounds like an enormously pompous concept.
But an education in virtue and self-restraint is something that everybody reading this essay will have experienced. Every parent knows it would be a terrible idea if they allowed their child to get what it wanted all of the time. Bringing up a child is in no small part a lesson in self-government: parents and schools shape a child into a functioning member of society, who won’t gorge themself on chocolate biscuits right before dinner, and who will do their homework, even if they don’t want to. To put it slightly crudely, the ancients did not think that this kind of education should stop in the teenage years: Aristotle would be very confused by modern society’s assumption that we should stop cultivating virtue at the age of 18.
The liberal sleight-of-hand was to take the term ‘liberty’, and redefine it to mean precisely the opposite of what it used to. For a modern liberal, ‘liberty’ does not mean the presence of internal restraint, but rather the absence of external restraint. I am free if I can do what I like, and this means I have the choice to practise self-restraint, but I do not have to. A liberal citizen might choose to develop themself by reading self-help books or Stoic philosophers, but the terms and conditions of the social contract do not require this; the only exceptions we make to this rule concern the upbringing of children.
Why did we reject the pre-liberal understanding of ‘freedom’? Well, first, it is a demanding standard. You can argue that nobody will ever be truly ‘free’, in the pre-liberal sense – and certainly, this kind of freedom will never be achieved by most people. Some people will be freer than others; it’s an élitist concept.
The ancient understanding of ‘freedom’ can also seem dangerously naïve at the political level. For a liberal, rather than aspiring to the ‘high’, we should instead ground our politics in the ‘low’ side of human beings, because human beings more reliably exhibit those characteristics. We can see this in the thought of Machiavelli, who was not a liberal, but whose philosophy influenced later liberals. According to Deneen:
Rather than promoting unrealistic standards of behavior – especially self-limitation – that could at best be unreliably achieved, Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed and the quest for glory. He argued further that liberty and political security were better achieved by pitting different domestic classes against one another, encouraging each to limit the others through “ferocious conflict” in the protection of their particular interests rather than by lofty appeals to a “common good” and political concord. By acknowledging ineradicable human selfishness and the desire for material goods, one might conceive of ways to harness those motivations rather than seeking to moderate or limit those desires.
The word ‘might’ in the final sentence is doing a heck of a lot of heavy lifting. In some cases we can harness the fallen angels of our nature. But it seems presumptive to think we will always be able to engineer our way out of the dark side of humanity.
The purpose of the American governmental system of checks and balances is to ‘make ambition counteract ambition’. Checks and balances feature in the pre-liberal understanding of politics, but here there is a difference of emphasis. The American system assumes that, because politicians are not angels, there is no place for virtue in our politics: rather than aspiring to the ‘high’, but putting in place checks and balances just in case, it assumes the ‘low’ will always rule – and so checks and balances become the whole system, rather than just a safeguard. It is a ‘republic of laws not men’, where the system is supposed to just keep functioning in the absence of virtuous statesmen.
I leave it to the reader to judge how well the US system works, when the Americans are not fortunate enough to have a President who is carved into Mount Rushmore.
A corollary of the liberal definition of ‘freedom’ is the liberal vision of the human being – what we might call ‘Liberal Man’.
Liberals prefer not to think about their ideology in this way, because liberalism is supposed to be neutral about the way in which people live their lives. A Vision of Man is for the totalitarians: Communists explicitly tried to create New Soviet Man, and the Nazis had a clear vision of what they wanted a German to be. Part of the appeal of liberalism is that liberals don’t do this: although liberal regimes don’t always live up to their ideals of tolerance, in theory you can be as much a citizen of a liberal regime if you are a fundamentalist Christian as if you are a gay libertine. Trying to shape the character of liberal citizens seems, well, illiberal.
But while most liberals would instinctively deny the existence of ‘Liberal Man’, this does not mean he doesn’t exist. Liberalism, like any other regime, makes assumptions about human nature, and tries to shape human beings, albeit in a subtler way than the Soviets did.
At its heart, liberalism sees human beings as free choosers of their own ethics. As Deneen puts it, “Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not any particular conception of the “Good.” ” Liberalism does not force us to make any assumptions that particular things or actions are Good in themselves. It lets us wave ethical debates away from our politics with the maxim, ‘let free individuals decide for themselves’. You can choose.
Obviously, many liberals, especially in the past, did and do have strong conceptions of the Good. But they come from different philosophical traditions, which is again part of liberalism’s appeal: it is possible to be a consequentialist liberal, or a deontological liberal, or a Catholic liberal, or a Jewish liberal, in a way that it is not possible to be, say, a utilitarian Reactionary or a godly Communist.
In place of the Good, liberalism defends people’s Rights, and at the core of liberal conception of rights is the idea of consent. From the point of view of liberalism, whether an action is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is the concern of the individual; the only concern of the State, and of the wider polity, is whether that action infringes on the Rights of another person, without their consenting to it.
There is obviously nothing wrong with rights as a concept in itself. The problem comes when we confuse rights with ethics. If your politics is not founded on any conception of morality, then it is not hard for the political theory to become an ethical theory.
It is therefore not surprising that liberal regimes often tend towards legalism, the view that the Venn diagram of what is legal and what is good is a circle. To understand this, we need to understand the place of law in liberal thought. Liberalism is not anarchism. It does not say, ‘there ought to be no external constraints on human behaviour’. But most strands of liberal thought do hold that the only legitimate, external, constraints on human behaviour are placed on us by the law. We are free to subject ourselves to constraints placed by whichever religious or ethical teachings we like. But other people can only constrain us through law, because law is, in some way, chosen, which we can justify either by a theory of the Social Contract, or in more recent centuries, by the idea of democratic consent.
Liberalism is a politics which holds that morality is a personal matter. Indeed, there is no requirement that we have a sense of morality at all! It is also a politics which holds that men are not responsible for restraining themselves – instead, the State is responsible for restraining us, through law. Legalism is the obvious next step. As Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in a commencement address at Harvard (emphasis mine), said of liberal American society:
If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risks. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everyone strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: After all, people are free not to purchase it.)
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.
The anticulture
There are two things you need to do when you critique liberalism. First, you need to define it. Second, you need to acknowledge the good things it has done.
So, here goes: the Divine Right of Kings has been exposed for the fiction that it is. Church and State have been separated. Parliaments are elected in direct, regular, free and fair elections. Speech, the press, and association are subject to few controls by the State. Women can own property in their own right. Liberalism emancipated the slaves, and it liberated the gays. It granted independence to the colonies. It freed trade, and it created the Welfare State. Our ancestors could never have conceived of the material benefits that even the poorest enjoy in the rich world, enabled by a free market that lets us harness natural resources and the laws of nature for the sake of human prosperity. Liberalism has brought development to the Third World, and has all but abolished war in the First. Things are just better than they were before liberalism.
And going further: liberalism is perhaps the greatest force for progress in human history, the torch of liberty not only making our society wealthier and happier, but also more moral; it is a force that has enlightened us, banished silly superstitions, and grounded politics in a rational belief in the equality and dignity of human beings. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. And although there have always been naysayers and forces of reaction – aristocrats and clerics, robber barons and warmongers, colonial administrators and science deniers – all of these people have ultimately been proved to be on the Wrong Side of History. We would do well not to follow them.
The cliché I have described in the previous two paragraphs is known as the whig interpretation of history – the idea that liberalism has been an unqualified success. In its most extreme form, the whig interpretation sees history as a morality play: the forces of light will eventually conquer the forces of darkness! But even if the Harry Potter interpretation of history lacks nuance, there is truth in a steelmanned whig view. I do not disagree with a word in the first of those two paragraphs, because the present really is better on the whole, materially and morally, than the past.
(Maybe this is why traditionalists focus so much on architecture. Nearly everybody will agree that buildings were more beautiful in the past. But even though we should re-discover the art of beautiful architecture – do we wish to return to much else from back then?)
Although he should perhaps have spent more time acknowledging the successes of liberalism, Deneen’s critique is much more sensible than just the word ‘RETVRN’ repeated 70,000 times. He is not a strawman reactionary who believes you can draw a direct line of causation from William of Ockham to the conditions of today. Instead, his argument is that the liberal regime does not work, and will one day collapse under the weight of its contradictions.
For Deneen, the contradictions in liberalism are ultimately rooted in its destruction of culture: the cultural bonds that hold societies together inevitably get dissolved under the liberal regime. Culture would seem like an unlikely focus for an ideology which, depending on the century, has usually preferred to undermine the Divine Right of Kings, restrictive tariffs, or racism. But according to Deneen, culture is a natural target for liberalism:
A better way to understand culture is as a kind of collective trust. Culture is the practice of full temporality, an institution that connects the present to the past and the future. As the Greeks understood, the mother of culture – of the Nine Muses – was Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.” Culture educates us about our generational debts and obligations. At its best, it is a tangible inheritance of the past, one that each of us is obligated to regard with the responsibilities of trusteeship. It is itself an education in the full dimension of human temporality, meant to abridge our temptation to live within the present, with the attendant dispositions of ingratitude and irresponsibility that such a narrowing of temporality encourages. Preserved in discrete human inheritances – arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion – culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.
Put like this, it is hard to find a concept that a liberal would find more objectionable. For one, it is nonconsensual. You are born into your culture, and it is very difficult to adopt another one properly. It can take a lifetime of work to properly learn the customs, habits and inheritances of a different place: even the best-integrated immigrants struggle. Even fewer of them will permanently leave behind the culture of their birth. At a smaller scale, the cultural habits a person picks up from their family or community will usually remain with them for life.
And you, as an individual, have no influence over the way in which your culture changes. The market may be a gargantuan, distant entity – but the individual consumer has at least some influence over which products are produced. Likewise, the individual voter has a say, albeit a small one, in government policy. With culture, however, the individual has no sovereignty; they are stuck with a set of practices, ideas and artefacts that change with no tangible logic to them. As well as being arbitrary and irrational, culture somehow seems stifling to the individual’s ability to forge their own path; it is precisely the kind of thing that we should expect the liberal regime to attack.
I should add (because Deneen does not) that the importance of culture isn’t neglected by all liberals. Edmund Burke clearly fits within the liberal tradition, but his catchphrase is, ‘[society is] a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. For Burke, we have a cultural inheritance from our parents, which we have a duty to conserve for the benefit of our children.
But since the 1960s, few modern liberals have been Burkean. They have either directly attacked our cultural inheritance, or stood by while others have attacked it. Just as the State, and society, should try to be as neutral as possible when it comes to religious belief, for most modern liberals it would be presumptuous to say that there is one way we should do culture; culture is something that should be done by consenting adults in the privacy of their own art galleries.
The result is that the art galleries of today are fundamentally places of preservation, not of conservation. To preserve something is like pickling it in aspic: you keep it around to look at, but it isn’t alive, while to conserve something is to nurture it. In the current world, we enjoy Constable, but we don’t paint like him. Paradise Lost is still read, and probably never will be entirely forgotten, but what makes Philip Pullman so unusual as a successful contemporary writer is that The Amber Spyglass is so directly inspired by a part of the English cultural inheritance. The canon – in the sense of a set of cultural forms, tropes, and techniques that have evolved over the centuries – is preserved in libraries, but almost nobody today creates works of culture that clearly form part of the canon.
The overwhelming sense of this loss of our connection with the past through tangible culture is sterility, because although we could rebuild a perfect replica of the Bodleian Library if it burned down, nobody could build something like it today. Nobody wants to, and nobody could, and if anybody tried to, they’d be accused of pastiche.
Another side of culture is community:
No thinker has more ably discerned the deracinating effects of modern life than the Kentucky farmer, novelist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry. An unapologetic defender of community in place, Berry regards community as a rich and varied set of personal relationships, a complex of practices and traditions drawn from a store of common memory and tradition, and a set of bonds forged between a people and place that – because of this situatedness – is not portable, mobile, fungible, or transferrable. Community is more than a collection of self-interested individuals brought together to seek personal advancement. Rather, it “lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness”.
What Deneen and Berry are describing here is what social scientists call social capital: the shared norms, values and bonds of trust that enable humans to co-operate with one another.
Social capital does not come into existence as if by magic. It has to be developed and cultivated. A strong, stable community, in which social bonds are able to develop over time between an appropriate number of individuals, and in which norms are easily able to be shared and remembered, is a place in which social capital will thrive.
To the liberal, though, this too is stifling. It seems somehow too limiting, too restrictive. There are economic reasons to abandon the place where you grew up, and move to the big city. But there are also reasons that are grounded in the liberal conception of human beings. For the liberal, we should throw off unchosen obligations. We should not feel tied down to a particular place, or restrained by the need to be part of our community. Instead, community should be an obligation that we freely choose: If you want to stay behind in rural Kentucky, you can choose to do so. If you want to move to Chicago, you can also do so.
Liberals would say that this is the best of both worlds. But a person’s choices do not happen in a vacuum. Staying behind in rural Kentucky is the low-status option. Nor is it economically viable for most people: it is only a free choice in the trivial sense that the State has not imposed any internal migration controls, because if there are no jobs in your small town, you have little choice but to move, even if you lose your community. As more economic growth agglomerates towards particular cities, people’s desire to stay in their community will always be subsumed to the need to make money in those cities, whose populations are large and transient. It’s hard to find real, permanent community in Chicago.
A metaphor for what has changed in liberal modernity is the difference between a priest and a therapist. Both provide people with spiritual comfort. But the priest is at the centre of a community. His sermons are heard by a congregation. A congregation is an act of collective worship: all its members, when they pray together and when they sing together, become part of something that is more than just the sum of its parts. The therapist administers help to one person at a time. There is no community on the couch, and no sense that a person experiencing therapy might be part of something wider than just themself. It is individual (and it is expensive).
In a more fundamental way, community sits uneasily with the abstractions that lie at the core of liberal thought. Liberal thinkers have often grounded their philosophy in thought experiments. A thought experiment is appealing because it allows us to abstract away the messiness of the real world, and instead try to get to the core of the matter. The subject of a thought experiment is an idealised vision of a human being – you don’t have to wrestle with people as we find them in the messy, real world. To take the most famous thought experiment, in a State of Nature, the State is brought into being by the signing of the Social Contract, even though in the real world, States already exist without anybody’s formally consenting to it. To take another, later thought experiment, behind the veil of ignorance, we are able to develop an ideal system of social justice, without reference to any of the human societies that actually exist.
Part of the appeal of a thought experiment is its universality: it should turn out the same in every culture, because all that it relies upon is a minimal set of assumptions about human nature. But thought experiments are only universal because they are imaginary; nobody has ever signed a Social Contract, or had to make decisions in the original position. In the thought of both Hobbes (who was not a liberal, but whose thought influenced liberals) and Rawls (who was), the subject of politics is an abstract person, living in an abstract world – human beings stripped down to what is supposed to be their essence. Social capital, culture, custom – all of these things defy abstraction, because they are developed not by imaginary people in a thought experiment, but by real people in the real world.
Liberal thinkers would not go so far as to deny the importance of community, or of social capital, or of culture. But nor does the thought-experiment philosophy of liberalism have much room for these things.
In the absence of a coherent liberal defence of culture, it is slowly being eroded. And there is something insidious about the way in which this has happened. We instinctively think that ‘destruction of culture’ involves Islamists blowing up temples, Fascists declaring art to be degenerate, or Communists imprisoning writers. Liberalism does not destroy culture through repression: under a liberal regime, you are undoubtedly still allowed to paint in the style of an Old Master, in a way you were not under Communism. The State will not stop you from finding your own sense of community, as totalitarian regimes do. Instead, liberalism nibbles away gradually at the culture, bit by bit deconstructing our sense of connection with the past and our sense of obligation to the future, making us forget. Deneen again, writing about the chronicler of early American liberal democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville:
[Tocqueville] fretted especially about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and hence to consider long-term implications of their actions and deeds as part of a long-term human community. While a constitutive feature of an aristocratic age was the pervasive understanding of oneself as defined by one’s place in a generational order, a hallmark of democracy was to ‘break’ that chain in the name and pursuit of the liberation of the individual.
…
Tocqueville notes that the propensity to think only within the context of one’s own lifespan, and to focus on satisfaction of immediate and baser pleasures, is a basic “propensity in human nature.” To chasten, educate and moderate this basic instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious and familial structures, practices and expectations.
In other words, liberal modernity makes it easier to be a presentist, and harder to be a longtermist. It is natural for human beings to take for granted the good things that we have. If we are told we should not feel a debt to our ancestors, then we will not do so. An individualist culture that makes us think only in the context of our own lifespans will find it easy to ignore the G. K. Chesterton quotation:
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
Tradition is hard. It takes work to think outside of our lives and to empathise with the past, especially when our modern lives are so different from those of even our grandparents when they were the same age. It is difficult to give votes to your ancestors when they are such different people from you.
But respecting tradition is made harder by the society we live in. Nobody is telling us to put in the work to empathise with our ancestors. In part, this is because we like to think of ourselves as rational, and unless you know about cultural evolution and Chesterton’s Fence, it is hard to come up with a good, rational reason to respect tradition. Our attachment to the past may run deep, but it is an emotional attachment. It is easy to see it as another form of superstition which a superior intellect can see through: the term ‘nostalgia’ is used dismissively by many people in part because nostalgia is an emotional response, and modern humans like to think of themselves as governed by reason. Respecting tradition takes a willingness to accept that ‘things just are the way they are’.
Likewise, we will struggle to feel an obligation to our descendants, if nobody tells us to do so. It takes constant reminder that there will be descendants of ours much more distant than our children or grandchildren. It’s easier to think that future generations will basically be able to take care of themselves: ‘we’ll manage to adapt to climate change’. They will have the ability to do so, but that does not make it right for us to squander the family silver and leave nothing to our children.
Deneen calls this the practice of “full temporality” because tradition and concern for the long-term future go hand-in-hand: when you are told to honour your ancestors, it becomes much more natural to think about the people to whom you are an ancestor. Tradition teaches us to appreciate the things that our ancestors built up, which in turn gives us a sense of obligation to conserve them for the sake of our descendents.
And yet, the modern world is no friend to tradition; and feeling this sense of obligation becomes especially hard as we grow more distant from the time when we did not have the good things we enjoy. If you live in the liberal, democratic, prosperous West, it is hard to remember how quickly things can fall apart; when our civilisation seems so permanent, it takes an acculturation with the past to understand just how lucky we have it, and how our civilisation did not just spring into existence, but was built, and can fall down again. In 1897, running against the triumphalist mood of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, Kipling wrote:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
One hundred years later, all the pomp was gone, as pomp always does. The late Victorians did not think it would, but being a longtermist takes training: it requires us not to forget.
Individualism and statism
Now we can start to understand the contradiction in liberalism. As Deneen puts it, “As culture fades, Leviathan waxes and responsible liberty recedes.” Liberalism deconstructs the cultural inheritance that enables us to act as responsible, restrained citizens, existing as part of a community, who can be trusted to exercise their freedom without causing problems for others. It makes us into autonomous individuals, but it also destroys the culture that would enable us to use our autonomy responsibly; it simultaneously erodes the willingness to be virtuous, while increasing the need to be virtuous. Eventually, the State has to step in, and pick up the pieces.
Obviously, this does not happen immediately – if it did, we would immediately see social breakdown every time a new liberal policy was enacted. Deneen’s claim is instead that:
Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life – familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national – reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.
In other words, the problem with liberalism is that you eventually run out of other people’s social capital.
The reservoir of social capital, in Deneen’s telling, is being dried up thanks to the efforts of both Left and Right – even though neither of them really want it this way.
Both Left and Right are Liberal: the main point of disagreement is not about the liberal order, or of liberal principles, or of liberal philosophy, or about the effects of liberalism, but instead about where liberalism should be applied. Most Western countries have one party or group of parties which combines social liberalism with at least some scepticism of free markets. Call this Left-liberalism. Most Western countries have another party or group which combines a degree of social conservatism with pretty laissez-faire economic policies. Call this Right-liberalism. Deneen is scathing:
[T]he proponents and heirs of classical liberalism – those whom we today call “conservative” – have at best offered lip service to the defense of “traditional values” while its leadership class unanimously supports the main instrument of practical individualism in our modern world, the global “free market.” This market – like all markets – while justified in the name of “laissez-faire,” in fact depends on constant state energy, intervention, and support, and has consistently been supported by classical liberals for its solvent effect on traditional relationships, cultural norms, generational thinking, and the practices and habits that subordinate market considerations to concerns born of interpersonal bonds and charity.
When we think about Right-liberalism, it is instructive to look at the career of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was Britain’s most successful Conservative Prime Minister since the Second World War. She is remembered best of all for her laissez-faire economic policies – either as the deregulating, tax-cutting Thatcher who steadfastly took on the Trades Unions in the mid-1980s. Both of these aspects of her legacy are things that enabled an expansion of the market. Famously, she once banged a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty onto a table during a Conservative Party meeting in order to cut off an opponent, with the words, “this, gentlemen, is what we believe.” The Constitution of Liberty is a liberal book, written by a liberal economist, whose last chapter is entitled, ‘Why I am not a Conservative’. The one socially conservative piece of legislation that Thatcher introduced – Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which banned the “promot[ion] of homosexuality” in schools – was notorious in part because it was so unusual. Even if she was conservative in her personal temperament, her opposition to social liberalism was a matter of personal conscience, rather than anything that she felt should be reflected in policy. She did nothing to reverse the rising social liberalism of the 1960s and 70s. She was a Conservative politician who was not a conservative.
I’m not strongly inclined towards social conservatism. But if you are a social conservative, as Patrick Deneen is, there is good reason for extreme pessimism about the Conservative and Republican parties. Both parties have been remarkably successful at expanding the reach of the market. And both parties have done nothing, or almost nothing, that successfully dams back social liberalism. The Republicans, who have had a bit more success, have chalked up precisely one major victory for social conservatism in the last 50 years – the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and which even then was only accomplished in 2022, at a time when American public opinion is becoming more pro-Choice. And the Republicans have made no attempt to conserve the aspects of our culture that substantively enable human flourishing: the cultural norms, the means of fulfilling the human desire for belonging, the sense of community, the moral values, which together constitute our way of life.
Deneen’s venom is directed at Right-liberals, because he is on the Right. But a similar set of criticisms also apply to Left-liberals. Their liberal side points them in favour of diversity. And their left side means they place solidarity at the heart of their politics, in particular solidarity that is expressed financially through the Welfare state.
It’s not hard to see that the two values are frequently in conflict. It is very hard indeed to feel solidarity for people who are very different from you; with the best will in the world, most people’s moral circles are not large enough to seriously include people who have different lifestyles from them, or who have different moral values. In a democracy, solidarity and diversity will come into conflict.
What I am describing here is the progressive’s dilemma – the idea that, in a democracy, you can either have a strong Welfare State, or a liberal immigration regime, but not both. If you try to combine the two, you will weaken the solidarity that a successful Welfare State depends on. As the journalist David Goodhart, quoting a Conservative politician, put it when he coined the term in 2004:
“The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties which they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, ‘Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn’t do?’ This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens.”
Goodhart was obviously criticised for ‘genteel xenophobia’. But even if Left-liberals themselves are convinced that it is possible to combine the best of 1990s Sweden with the best of 1990s America, no country has managed to do so successfully.
The most obvious cultural divides are the ones caused by immigration. But it is entirely possible for somebody to feel culturally completely alien from another member of their nationality. In both Britain and America, one part of society views another part as backward-looking, prejudiced, foolish and maybe even bigoted. In return, they are seen as out-of-touch, élitist and snobbish. Thousands of liberal journalists would not have flocked to the likes of Ohio and Hartlepool since 2016 to write tedious dispatches from Flyover Country or the Red Wall, if there were no deep cultural divisions within our nations.
The fact that Trump or Brexit voters are such an anthropological curiosity to their opponents is precisely the point: if you are needing to have your countrymen explained to you as if they were foreigners, social solidarity has broken down. It is surprising that Left-liberals have not considered the way in which this will undermine their beloved Welfare State. If the white working-class are bigoted, then are you going to expect them to want to pay for a foreigner’s council house? Equally, as a forward-thinking progressive, should you financially support the bigots?
In other words, there are major tensions in the ideologies of both the modern liberal Left and the modern liberal Right. For sure, Left-liberals and Right-liberals are not perfect mirror images of one another. In particular, Right-liberals are often content to advocate laissez-faire, while maintaining an aesthetic of traditionalism. The two value systems are not really in conflict, because Right-liberals were never committed to defending one of them in the first place. This is not to say that mainstream Republican politicians do not have deep personal commitments to Christianity and traditional values – just that they are very unwilling to make that commitment in the political sphere. Right-liberals have internalised the liberal idea that religion and culture should be private matters to such a degree that conservative religion and conservative culture are slowly dying out.
But with Left-liberals, there is a genuine conflict in their beliefs, because they simultaneously attack individualism in the market, while also promoting it in the personal sphere. The Hippie ideology – fuck the system, live your life how you want, man – is about as individualistic an idea as they come. It is atomising.
Of course, Hippieism does not preclude a sense of community, because like-minded weirdos can go to obscure festivals or play DnD together. But this side of Left-liberalism certainly introduces an inequality into a sense of community. Some people will be able to make their own way in life, and find meaning and fulfilment on their own terms. Others will not – and in the absence of the kinds of obligatory institutions, in particular strong families, churches and communities – in the absence of those things they will be left out in the cold.
Even though the conflicts within their beliefs differ, the important parallel between Left- and Right-liberals is that in both cases, the non-liberal parts of their ideology get stuffed, liberalism wins, and the losers succumb to fentanyl addiction. We see this most obviously in San Francisco:
What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin Walker—these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.
The obvious culprit for the conditions of San Francisco is the Left-liberal city government, which believes anybody should be allowed to do anything they want, even if that means the poorest have to bear the brunt of the petty crime and the needles in the streets. But the fentanyl has to be supplied by somebody. Right-liberals at the national level show no appetite for regulating the companies that make it and sell it and whose profits are proportional to the number of addicts they can make, because that would infringe upon the free market. The opioid crisis has been made by politicians from both sides of the aisle.
But the most concerning thing of all is how dependent we have become on the State to stop the crisis. The only solution to San Francisco is the government: there are no virtuous, restrained selves, or families, or churches, or communities that could prevent social decay from happening in the first place. There is no sense among the Sackler family that there are some things that are not merely business, or that there are some products that the Market should not provide. Without a concept of virtue, we rely on the State. As Deneen puts it:
Liberalism thus increasingly requires a legal and administrative regime, driven by the imperative of replacing all nonliberal forms of support for human flourishing (such as schools, medicine, and charity), and hollowing any deeply held sense of shared future or fate among the citizenry. Informal relationships are replaced by administrative directives, political policies, and legal mandates, undermining voluntary civic membership and requiring an ever-expanding state apparatus to ensure social cooperation. The threat and evidence of declining civic norms require centralized surveillance, highly visible police presence, and a carceral state to control the effects of its own successes while diminishing civic trust and mutual commitment.
At this point, the obvious objection to Deneen is that his use of the term ‘liberalism’ only means the hyper-individualistic liberalism of America. Certainly, America is a strange, brash place: fights break out in parking lots over a space, progressives baulk at paying higher taxes, single-family zoning is jealously guarded as the American Way. It’s the place where libertarianism was invented, where we find both San Francisco and Florida Man, where millions admire and elect as President a clammy egotist, where the homeless are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, a place in which throughout its history, despite its republican form of government that is meant to solve problems through debate, people have preferred to settle their differences of opinion by shooting one other. America is a ‘fuck you – no fuck you’ country.
Europe, too, has individualistic societies. But there is a difference in degree. To an outsider, there is something broken about American society; it feels as though it has reached the natural conclusion of ‘every man for himself’. When Deneen writes about decaying social bonds, we instinctively know what he is talking about – but only if we think about San Francisco, which is so broken that it is crying out for a mighty government to clean up the streets, even if it comes at the price of San Franciscans’ freedom. When Deneen talks about “highly visible police presence”, it is hard not to think of the places in America where social trust has broken down to such a degree that the Police need to dress up like an invading army.
To show that Deneen is also talking about the world outside of America, then, two examples, which both come from Britain, seem apt. The first concerns payment for childcare. To save on nursery fees, it is common practice, or used to be, for neighbours to agree to look after each other’s children. It would be usual, however, for one neighbour to pay the other a bit of money in return: the bonds between neighbours might be strong enough to provide childcare, but not so strong that they will do it for free.
However, if money changes hands, then the neighbour needs to be registered with Ofsted, the government regulator for childminders. You need a licence to look after your neighbour’s children, because in the eyes of the State you are now a childminder, and all childminders have to be registered and regulated. There are of course good child-protection reasons for regulating nurseries: parents won’t know the person who’ll be looking after their child. But there is an obvious difference between ‘sending your children to a nursery’ and ‘letting Mr and Mrs Next Door take care of them every so often’: neighbourly childcare is personal, based on mutual trust. The bureaucracy, however, does not care. “Informal relationships are replaced by administrative directives”.
The second concerns knife-crime. The phrase “carceral state”, which Deneen uses, is normally associated with Left-liberal progressives, who argue that the police, prisons and mass incarceration exist in order to preserve the status quo by force. But I think Deneen provides a more convincing explanation. The liberal State does not set out to arrest and lock up its population. Instead, it is forced to, by circumstance. In England and Wales, for instance, it is illegal to carry “any article which has a blade or is sharply pointed” in a public place, unless you have a “good reason” for doing so. This law provides much mirth for libertarians on the Internet, because in England and Wales it is literally illegal to carry any sort of knife around. (You can’t even get a permit – it’s less ‘you got a loicense for that knife mate?’ so much as ‘you’re nicked for carrying that knife mate’.) But in Britain, guns are illegal, so the weapon of choice for violent criminals is the knife; faced with these circumstances, it is a rational response to proscribe knives in public.
This makes us a liberal country, whose liberal State bans you from carrying around a kitchen-knife.
None of this would be necessary if social bonds were strong enough to prevent most knife crime. But in the absence of that, our choice is: do we allow ourselves to be coerced by knife criminals, or do we get coerced by the State. Without strong social bonds to restrain human behaviour, the relative distribution of coercive power might change, but not its magnitude. Man is free to live his life as he chooses, man has no ties that he has not chosen himself, man is supported in doing all of this by the State, man is liberated – and some of the men who cannot quite hack it turn to knife crime. Denial of the commons becomes a tragedy of the commons. Rinse, repeat.
The Last Man?
Liberal democracies, in other words, are not self-sufficient: the community life on which they depend must ultimately come from a source different from liberalism itself.
This quotation summarises Deneen’s argument. But it was not written by Patrick Deneen. Instead, it was written by Francis Fukuyama.
Fukuyama is often seen as either a triumphalist, or an idiot. A triumphalist, because he wrote an essay titled The End of History?, then three years later a book, which kept the title but confidently lost the question mark, telling us that liberal democracy had conclusively won after the collapse of Communism. And an idiot, because clearly things carried on happening after 1989.
To clear up the obvious misconception, The End of History does not say this. Instead, Fukuyama’s argument is that capital-H History – a “meaningful order to the broad sweep of human events” – will finally come to an end with liberal democracy. History is not cyclical; the Historical process is that all parts of the world will gradually, inevitably, move towards liberal democracy. For Fukuyama, this will not be a quick process, and nor will it be free of roadblocks: events will carry on happening. Some countries, like Afghanistan, will try to hold out against liberal democracy for as long as they can. Other countries, like Russia or China, will try to come up with their own alternative regimes, which will last a while, until those also collapse under their own contradictions. And even the liberal democracies themselves will have different flavours of both liberalism and democracy. But we will all end up in the same place.
The most obvious justification is that, so far, liberal capitalism is the only economic system that can deliver widespread prosperity. But although this is part of the explanation for why liberal democracy has been slowly conquering the world, it is not sufficient. After all, liberalism is not necessary for economic development – South Korea’s military dictatorship was able to deliver prosperity by force, and China has been doing something similar for the past forty years.
But more importantly, humans are not just motivated by material desires. The revolutions of 1989 were motivated by a desire for prosperity, but also by a desire for something else. The Romanian revolution didn’t begin with demonstrations over shortages, but with protests in Timişoara among the Hungarian minority, after the government tried to imprison a Hungarian pastor. The regime in East Germany was not toppled by protestors shouting, ‘We want shorter queues’, but „Wir sind das Volk“, ‘We are the people’. Clearly there was something else at stake.
Fukuyama’s argument is that liberal democracy is the only system that can satisfy the human need for material prosperity, and can satisfy the human need for dignity. Human beings have “an innate human sense of justice: people believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people act as though they are worth less – when they do not recognize their worth at its correct value – then they become angry.” Liberal democracy recognises that we all have this sense of self-worth. There are no masters, and no slaves, under liberal democracy – instead, everybody gets a share of being the master, through participating in democracy and through having their rights respected by the State.
Other regimes that humans have invented do not grant us this dignity. Communism, according to Fukuyama:
humiliated ordinary people by forcing them to make a myriad of petty, and sometimes not so petty, moral compromises with their better natures. These took the form of putting up a sign in one’s store window, or signing a petition denouncing a colleague for doing something the state did not like, or simply remaining silent when that colleague was unjustly persecuted.
Communism fell partly because the economics did not work. That would have been enough to eventually force the Eastern Bloc regimes to open up to the world. But it fell so dramatically because life under Communism was undignified. Liberty and equality are appealing because they speak to a non-material part of the human psyche – the part that wants to be recognised as a human being, not just given creature comforts. It is this part of the human psyche that will go out into the streets in protest, that will say, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’ For Fukuyama, this is as much a motor of history as economic conditions.
So far, Fukuyama has not been proved wrong. The direction of travel since 1989 really has been towards capitalist, liberal democracy. More of the world is free, and more of the world is prosperous, than thirty years ago. And with enemies like this, who needs friends! Islamism may have threatened the peace in liberal democracies, but it was never a serious ideological competitor. The Russian model shows no sign of providing an acceptable alternative to democracy: Russia is having to attempt to implement it in Ukraine by force, while most Ukrainians would rather move towards liberal democracy. And since its COVID hypochondria, the Chinese model seems less and less like a realistic alternative to liberal democracy.
For sure, thirty years is a very short period of time. A better ideology than liberalism may arise at some point. Or perhaps material circumstances will change: maybe AI will in some way make liberalism obsolete.
We can speculate about this until the cows come home. But the more interesting argument against Fukuyama is not speculative. As Fukuyama himself puts it (emphasis mine):
The problem of the end of history can be put in the following way: Are there any “contradictions” in our contemporary liberal democratic social order that would lead us to expect that the historical process will continue, and produce a new, higher order? We could recognize a “contradiction” if we saw a source of social discontent sufficiently radical to eventually cause the downfall of liberal democratic societies … It is not sufficient to point to “problems” in contemporary liberal democracies, even if they are serious ones like budget deficits, inflation, crime, or drugs. A “problem” does not become a “contradiction” unless it is so serious that it not only cannot be solved within the system, but corrodes the legitimacy of the system itself such that the latter collapses under its own weight.
In other words, Fukuyama will be proved wrong if liberal democracy actually is a self-contradictory system, which will eventually collapse under the weight of its contradictions.
This is precisely what Patrick Deneen claims. The end-game of liberalism will be a fetid society, one of extreme inequality, powerful corporations, an all-powerful State and no humanity. It will be
the perpetuation of a political system called “liberalism” that, becoming fully itself, operates in forms opposite to its purported claims about liberty, equality, justice, and opportunity. Contemporary liberalism will increasingly resort to imposing the liberal order by fiat – especially in the form of the administrative state run by a small minority who increasingly disdain democracy. End runs around democratic and populist discontent have become the norm, and backstopping the liberal order is the ever more visible power of a massive “deep state,” with extensive powers of surveillance, legal mandate, police power, and administrative control. These methods will continue to be deployed despite liberalism’s claim to rest on consent and popular support. Such a conclusion is paradoxical, not unlike Tocqueville’s conclusion in Democracy in America, in which he envisions democracy culminating in a new form of despotism.
But although such a system would not be liberal in a way that any liberal thinker would recognise it, it is still entirely consistent with an End of History. We would still have reached the final stage of our ideological evolution, because the problems within liberalism have been resolved within the regime, rather than by changing the regime.
This paints a pretty bleak picture of the End of History. Is this where we will all end up? Is liberal democracy just a transition-state between one form of tyranny and another? Are we really all on the wagon-train to despotism? Perhaps we are. But if that is the case then liberalism will not have failed, it will just have mutated into a final, monstrous form that is liberal in name only – a Brave New World. Nobody said the End of History would be fun. Fukuyama 1, Deneen nil.
In order for Deneen to win against Fukuyama, and give us hope that there’s a way out, there has to be a mechanism for liberalism to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Surprisingly, the best description of that mechanism is found within Fukuyama. Although he (unlike Deneen) is in favour of liberalism, when people read Fukuyama as a triumphalist, they forget the subtitle of his book: The Last Man. To see what he means by this, we need to consider what it will be like to live at the End of History. Fukuyama, in one of his more recent books, frames the problem of economic development in the Third World as, ‘How do we get to Denmark?’ Denmark is a free, prosperous, stable, equal society. It is not without its problems, in particular its ambivalence towards multiculturalism, but those problems are comparatively minor, and can be resolved within the structures of Denmark’s liberal democracy. It seems pretty close to the End of History.
But Denmark is – and there’s no other way of putting this – boring. The End of History is dull. There is nothing to fight for, nothing to animate the spirit. At the end of history, liberal democracy will have triumphed – but it will have done so only by eradicating the human spirit. As Fukuyama puts it:
But supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
The event that jumps to mind after reading this quotation is January 6. But the most striking thing about January 6 was not the fact that the rioters tried to disrupt the peaceful handover of power. It was that the rioters were so, well, orderly. They walked between the ropes in the Capitol. They followed the signs. They seemed more interested in posing for photos than in staging a coup. Of the five deaths in the attack, four of them were Trump supporters. Their struggle was not channelled into action. Fukuyama, again:
After the great events of the fall of 1989 in Eastern Europe, a significant number of Germans had doubts about the wisdom of unification because it would cost too much. These are not the hallmarks of a civilization wound tight like a spring, ready to immolate itself on the pyre of new and unforeseen fanaticisms, but rather of one quite satisfied with what it is and will be.
Times might change – there were only 75 years between mass protests in German cities agitating for the First World War, and Germans’ being on the fence about unification. In 75 years’ time, people might be struggling against liberal democracy. Perhaps this struggle will ultimately cause the liberal regime to collapse.
The way in which liberalism might fall, then, is for liberal citizens to begin to fight against liberalism. If that happens, then Deneen will be right that there is a contradiction in liberalism. But there has to be a reason why people should struggle against it. On this point, Deneen fails to be convincing. The downsides of liberalism that Deneen talks about – the hollowing-out of the working class, the deracination, the inequality, the decadence – were what led to the election of Donald Trump, and led to some of his supporters’ desire to keep in him power, through armed struggle.
And yet, while January 6 should concern us, the fact it was such a lethargic failure suggests that Deneen’s complaints about liberalism fall into the category of problems, rather than contradictions. Problems cause protests, but they do not cause regime change.
And even then, suppose that liberalism does manage to collapse. What does Patrick Deneen think is going to replace it? The obvious possibility is that our liberal democracy goes the way of Weimar Germany and turns into dictatorship. But that seems unlikely. Quite apart from our inoculation against Fascism being so effective that we see it everywhere, Weimar Germany is best viewed as a reminder that there will be roadblocks on the way to the End of History: the liberal regime might collapse into authoritarianism for a while, but after a War and a Wall it will be reunited, peaceful, liberal and democratic.
Rather than Fascism, Deneen desires a “humane, postliberal alternative” to liberalism, even though in 2018, when Why Liberalism Failed was published, he sensibly admitted that he does not have the answers yet. (His new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, suggests that his publisher might have managed to persuade him otherwise.) Five years ago Deneen felt that a postliberal philosophy must stem from what Left-liberals would call “lived experience”, rather than academic theorising. Postliberalism will emerge from taking the “Benedict Option”, named for Saint Benedict: people who reject liberalism should reject liberal society, go and live in non-liberal communities, and create their own counterculture:
Such efforts should focus on building practices that sustain culture within communities, the fostering of household economics, and “polis life,” or forms of self-governance that arise from shared civic participation. All such practices arise from local settings that resist the abstraction and depersonalization of liberalism, and from which habits of memory and mutual obligation arise.
In other words, postliberals should rebuild culture first, and from that will eventually emerge a new politics that is grounded in the reality of human life as it ought to be lived, rather than in thought experiments.
After the thunder of the preceding chapters, this vision for building postliberalism is a bit of a damp squib. Deneen himself does not sound convinced: the Benedict Option may be a valuable way for conservative Christians like Deneen to live apart from liberal society, but Deneen makes no argument for why a new political theory should emerge from the Benedict Option. Deneen’s friend Adrian Vermeule was also not convinced: in a review of Why Liberalism Failed, he instead expressed his desire for
a determination to co-opt and transform the decaying regime from within its own core. It may thus appear providential that liberalism, despite itself, has prepared a state capable of great tasks, as a legacy to bequeath to a new and doubtless very different future. The vast bureaucracy created by liberalism in pursuit of a mirage of depoliticized governance may, by the invisible hand of Providence, be turned to new ends, becoming the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good.
But even so, what should those “new ends” be? Judging by Vermeule and Deneen’s Substack, it looks like some kind of Catholic theocracy. Even if they somehow managed to win power to implement this strange vision, there is currently no substantive content to post-liberalism. We also cannot RETVRN. The null hypothesis is that liberalism will trundle along, solving its problems within the logic of its own system – even though the logic of liberalism might mean it is trundling towards Deneen’s description of liberal despotism. Perhaps, then, we are all heading towards the dystopia. Perhaps, we are never going to come off the road to Brave New World. Perhaps, Western civilisation will one day be inhabited by the Last Men.