Book of the Month May 2023: Why Liberalism Failed

 “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.

The Myth of the Silent Majority

 

It turns out all the assumptions of the Conservative political project were built on sand.

For years, the “normal folks” assumed that the small-town America of the 1980s was still lurking, unseen, around the corner. That when the crazies (on either end of the spectrum) raised one flag too many, pushed a little too hard, or assumed a bit too much, the “Silent Majority” would rise up and toss them all out. That A-mericuh—Land of the Red, White, AND Blue—would resume its customary sanity and we could all go back to normal. That folks just wouldn’t stand for any more of that s---.

They were wrong.