Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
★ Rubbish
I can’t remember where I first heard of this book, but I had it on my to-read list already when I saw it on the list of books Barack Obama read in 2018. As a proponent of liberal democracy reading a book that takes explicit aims at the foundations of all of modern Western political theory, I was not expecting to agree with everything in it off the bat. However, I figured it would give me an intellectual challenge, might sharpen my thinking, and perhaps would yield interesting insights. Instead, what I found was an angry, confused, and mean-spirited screed. Deneen does not make the case that liberalism has failed, much less explain why, and he doesn’t try to present a better alternative. Sadly, the book doesn’t even provide useful insight into the current malaise gripping large portions of the West. It’s spuriously argued, unserious as political philosophy, and not worth your time.
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame (previously Georgetown and Princeton). He is neither a conservative nor a liberal in modern American terms, but rather an arch-traditionalist, and he takes aims at all forms of progress, both social and economic. The focuses of his ire in Why Liberalism Failed are many, including markets, government, science, technology, business, law, globalization, insurance, consumerism, individualism, educational institutions, extramarital sex, birth control, multiculturalism, daycare, and the hiring of gardeners. He equates liberalism to unshackled individualism and imagines that it is at the root of all of these things. On that basis, he hates liberalism itself.
What Deneen really hates is modern society—basically everything post-Enlightenment, though especially starting with the sexual revolution. He is, first and foremost, angry about the state of the world. The book calls to mind the worst kind of hyperbolic cable news editorial, but with Trump’s bleak worldview replacing the typical partisanship. Indeed, like Trump, he considers the modern right and left as two mutually reinforcing sides of the same coin, in cahoots in furthering liberalism. Also like Trump, he is prone to imagining conspiracies and assigning malicious intent to those he disagrees with. In his view, the US Constitution itself is the original sin, and incredibly, he claims the founding fathers (even Madison!) were operating in bad faith, working to foster a mistrust in the people in order to subvert their will. While the book dresses it up in professorial language (“ersatz” this and that), this is more a Trumpian rant, born of grievance and willfully blind to reality, than a serious academic work.
So if Deneen hates liberalism, markets, government, science, rights, and all forms of progress, what does he want in their place? Community, self-restraint, nature, culture. Courtship, marriage for life, and lots of babies. He implicitly harkens back to some imagined pre-liberal glory days, when people constrained themselves and didn’t need laws to tell them the right thing to do. Rather than the “domination of nature” we have today, back then we lived in a “state of nature.” Instead of depending on insurance companies, we depended on our communities. Instead of women’s liberation, “the main practical achievement of [which] has been to move many… into the work force of market capitalism,” we had traditional family structures. Instead of the “weaponized timelessness” of progressivism, we had “gratitude towards the past and obligations for the future.” Instead of a society “based on rights and merit and productivity,” we had a hereditary aristocracy where ordinary people flourished. Instead of intrusive government, we were able to “self-rule” and had the “capacity to govern appetite and thus achieve a truer form of liberty.” We were “capable of living within natural limits, but also cultural limits, self-imposed.” We practiced the “self-restraints implied by neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, loyalty, and love.” Sure.
If you’re wondering what the evidence is that this wonderful state of nature and culture existed, or that progress since the Enlightenment has made people worse off… well, you’re out of luck. There is no such argument. (Actually, in the conclusion he outright states that no idyllic pre-liberal state ever existed, although he spends most of the book imagining one, and his argument requires one.) Deneen presents no evidence, only assertions, generalizations, and opinions. In doing so, he willfully ignores all the concrete good that liberal democracy has achieved in the world. He does not mention the huge gains we’ve seen on, for example, poverty, slavery, violence, war, child mortality, wealth, health, or human rights. He does not address data showing that people have grown happier over time and that increasing wealth within and across societies is correlated with increasing happiness. While he makes it clear that he hates modern society, it’s unclear what the actual human damage is that he perceives. Nor is there any argument that you should agree with him, other than his own opinion. He offers no specifics, just the sentiment that everything is terrible.
Most damagingly, Deneen does not even make a coherent case that liberalism is the problem. Yes, he hates the individualism and licentiousness of modern times, but in falsely equating this with liberalism, he creates a straw man. I too worry that crony capitalism leads to problematic inequality; that doesn’t necessitate renouncing all markets. I too feel that some people exhibit self-destructive behavior; that doesn’t give me the right to tell them what to do with their bodies. I too love front porches and the feeling of neighborhood community; that doesn’t imply rejecting the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This itself may sound like a straw man of Deneen’s argument, but in truth there isn’t much more to it than that. Opinions are followed by asserted consequences, with no logical connection. The book is a great primer on the philosophical meaning of “beg the question.”
In fact, while Deneen sees liberalism as the cause for all the wrongs in the modern world, most of the novel examples badly miss the mark. Among other things, he asserts that:
- individual freedom causes statism (socialists and authoritarians should feel slighted)
- liberalism leads to government surveillance (hello, USSR!)
- liberalism drives the depletion of natural resources (evidence says otherwise)
- subsistence societies are better than societies where everyone is well off but more unequal (the 217,000 people around the world who escape extreme poverty every day might take issue with that)
- free societies allocate wealth just as arbitrarily as hereditary aristocracies (so productivity & industriousness are as unfair as inheritance?)
- market capitalism reduces all but a few forms of work to drudgery and indignity (as opposed to all the creative jobs in Mao’s China or feudal England?)
- “today’s society produces economic winners and losers” (in contrast to which societies when? Today’s authoritarian Russia? The kingdom of Saudi Arabia? The USSR? The Qing dynasty? Victorian England? The Roman Empire? Egypt’s golden age?)
It’s entirely fair to bemoan statism, government surveillance, or environmental degradation. However, Deneen doesn’t do the work to show that these ills are caused by liberalism, and the assertion that they are flies in the face of the obvious evidence. These are facts of life across the modern world, not specifically under liberal democracy, and they are often worse under other forms of government. Many of our issues have been problems since pre-Enlightenment days.
Having thoroughly trashed liberalism, what antidote does Deneen prescribe? What would re-instill in us our lost senses of community, self-restraint, nature, and culture? There is no solution on offer. Deneen admits that socialism and fascism are worse options. He doesn’t explicitly say it, but presumably he would not prefer a monarchy, dictatorship, military junta or oligarchy. In fact, Deneen says we shouldn’t bother to look for a new theory or ideology as an alternative to liberalism. He suggests we need to invest in developing our culture, emphasizing household economics and local exchange, and self-governing at the local level. All of these are compatible with liberalism or other ideologies. Discarding liberalism is not likely to get us any closer to any of these goals; even if it would, there is no way to get there from here.
I am very sympathetic to Deneen’s underlying sentiment that modern society puts too much focus on individualism over community, consumerism over tradition, technology over nature. These trends can be traced to Enlightenment philosophy, and individualism is related to—though not equivalent to—liberalism. Obama wrote, “I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book 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.” However, the book doesn’t offer cogent insights on these points. It just screams that the feelings of loss exists. Those feelings are to be taken seriously, but this book doesn’t help us to understand them or respond to them more effectively. Further, there is no reason to believe that Trump (or Brexit, or AFD, or RN) voters agree with Deneen at all about the causes. While they may share the feelings, I don’t hear many calls to throw out the US Constitution, for a return to nature, or for self-restraint. Deneen’s extremist view is not representative of a significant portion of the population.
We would do well to exert more self-restraint, be more polite, and put more emphasis on our family and community. Identifying liberalism, which champions freedom and human rights, as the root cause of these challenges seems wrong, and trying to move past liberalism is certainly throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need more liberalism these days, not less. We can seek a form of liberalism that more fully embraces community, culture, and nature; there is no contradiction here. There is a valuable book to be written on how to do it. Why Liberalism Failed is not that book.
