“The cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty. In a deep irony, liberalism claims legitimacy based upon democratic consent, yet it ultimately hollows out the prospects for functioning democracy.”
If you pay any attention at all to my commonplaces for each month (and why would you?) you might have noted that most of the ones from last month were from one book: Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen. This is not a perfect book, but it is a good one. If I were pressed to name three books to help someone understand America's current political moment, they would be Carl Truman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement, and this one.
First, this is simply a well-written book. Deneen's prose carries a bit of academic flavor, but it is also loaded with the sorts of quotes that (like the one above) could head up some delightful blog posts. In a book of political science the beguiling temptation is to sacrifice readability for precision and lots of inside baseball. The author refused, and it shows.
Second, he has an intriguing thesis: liberalism has been lauded as the 20th century's greatest ideology, since it triumphed over both communism and fascism. But this triumph has brought about its own downfall because the system's own strengths (universal rights, economic freedom, and the absolute power of the individual) wind up rotting it out from the inside. Liberalism promised to unlock all the former systems that controlled people--class, economics, birth, gender, religion, etc. Individual choice became paramount and was defined as "freedom." But the only way to guarantee that every individual can make any choice is to raise up a massive state apparatus to control the chaos that results. So liberal states get caught in a wicked catch-22: to be free, they have to support choice; but they need ever more government to maintain these "freedoms."
"Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has “become more fully itself,” as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology. A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom. Its success can be measured by its achievement of the opposite of what we have believed it would achieve." (3)
Deneen notes that the political parties of our time are not really on opposite sides of this dilemma, but instead amplify particular aspects of it. The Democrats advocate for sexual and religious freedoms, and demand the government regulate whatever is necessary to achieve these--particularly economics. The Republicans flip the coin and want everything subordinated to economic freedoms--if you can pay for it, you can have it. Then they fight each other on opposite sides of the same issue but never really can arrive at a new solution. No matter who is in office, the deep state carves out more and more of a ditch to drag citizens into, like a black hole that feeds on everything around it.
We live in times when the state has grown to such an extent that people even question if it is possible to be free in the current world. From your toilet flushes to your conscience, the bureaucrats in power can order your life as they wish. Liberalism's universal solvent has eaten out every other societal unit to the point that there are no bulwarks or other options. Marriages, families, churches, towns are all made by choice, not by nature. It's the paradigm that paints over everything. When he points this out, you notice it everywhere. What is the last objection you heard to a position on either side of the aisle? I bet it involved some sort of "choice." Society itself has been atomized, which explains why all our technology tends in this direction:
"The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be “linking up the entire world,” what they’re actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone cloistered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more “friends” when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn’t transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this “society” collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggregates."--The Invisible Committee, NOW (quoted by Aaron Renn, Newsletter #70)
Third, though Deneen's book is far better on diagnosis than cure, he takes a small step in the right direction. His last word is a chapter urging readers to rebuild what liberalism has dissolved--the local connections, local economies, local social structures, etc. Instead of dissolving into impotent nostalgia for feudalism or the British Empire, move on from where you are.
Of course, I wouldn't agree with everything here. This book has one glaring oversight: Deneen claims that liberalism is flawed from the start, but what really made classic liberalism (Locke, etc.) work for the first 200 years was actually the thousand-plus years of Christianity undergirding all of it. We've been using up that moral capital ever since, and now that it's gone, we are watching liberalism crumple under its own weight. The author doesn't really have enough faith (or historical perspective) to recognize this--for all his critiques of the current order, he remains solidly a part of it (go here for some examples). Oddly enough, the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson called this shot--rather more accurately--over a hundred years before Deneen. I bumped into the following passage while chasing an internet rabbit trail and found it richly apropos:
"Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unraveled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own virtues. For that, in few words, is the case. We cannot trust ourselves to behave with decency; we cannot trust our consciences; and the remedy proposed is to elect a round number of our neighbors, pretty much at random, and say to these: "Be ye our conscience; make laws so wise, and continue from year to year to administer them so wisely, that they shall save us from ourselves and make us righteous and happy, world without end. Amen." And who can look twice at the British Parliament and then seriously bring it such a task?"--R.L. Stevenson, "The Day After Tomorrow" (1887)
Eerie, isn't it? Though he titled the essay "The Day After Tomorrow" it feels like it might have been written yesterday. An excellent diagnosis of what ails us.
