My, my, someone has quite the bee in their bonnet. Please educate us, Patrick, about these spectral ‘they’ who belong the deracinated ‘laptop class’. We’ve heard these rants before, about the perfidy of cosmopolitan elites.
For extended demolition, I strongly recommend looking at Matt Sleat’s new book Post-Liberalism. Though he makes clear that the truly insane and scary one is Adrian Vermuel
Johnson's piece nails Deneen's failure to offer a coherent prescription, but I think it misses a deeper irony about why postliberalism resonates in the first place. I've spent years puzzling over something Erich Fromm wrote about in 1941 that feels uncomfortably relevant now: the psychological burden of freedom itself. Fromm was trying to understand why whole societies willingly surrendered liberty to authoritarians, and his answer wasn't that they were ignorant or coerced. They were exhausted. The breakdown of traditional structures left individuals unmoored, and authoritarian movements offered something liberalism couldn't easily provide on its own, namely, a sense of belonging, certainty, and meaning.
Deneen diagnoses something real even if his cure is poison. Since 1991, we've experienced what I've started calling the Great Unraveling, the compounding dissolution of family, community, civic institutions, and shared national identity. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory formally declared loneliness an epidemic; isolation raises premature death risk by 26 percent, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes daily. Between 2003 and 2020 the time Americans spent with friends dropped by 67 percent. Nearly half of Americans now report having fewer than four close friends compared to just 27 percent in 1990.
Postliberalism thrives in this void not because its intellectual framework is sound but because it speaks to an existential ache that liberalism's defenders often dismiss. Trump's promise to bring back our jobs, our borders, our wealth is psychologically potent precisely because it offers collective certainty in exchange for the burden of freedom. As Fromm put it, the strongman who claims he can reinstate lost institutions offers an illusion, he cannot recreate what has been lost, and his authoritarian rule only deepens the psychological alienation. But illusions sell when the alternative is anomie.
The question liberals need to answer isn't just why Deneen is wrong. It's what institutions of belonging we're prepared to build.
Reactionary responses and proposing old ideas that have been disproven? I don't think it's a coincidence that Deneen and Amy Coney Barrett came from the same dismal campus.
One of the unintended, but inevitable, consequences of capitalism is the dissolution of hierarchies and traditions. And once dissolved they cannot be restored in any organic sense. The Humpty Dumpty syndrome. Deneen like those of his fellow travelers have some great restoration project in mind but meanwhile the god of economic destruction and creation dances on as it wills. The world we live in has more to do with amoral markets than any sort of morality. Appeals to authoritarianism will not solve anything. One of the features of most authoritarian governments is the thriving "black and grey" markets that meet consumer demands.
So like all reactionaries like Deneen they are prioritizing a fantasy of bringing back a golden age of hierarchies and traditions that never really existed outside of a cinema. But they earn a good living when people buy their books, ask them to speak at conferences and share their "perspective" (opinions informed or not) as paid pundits.
My suggestion for Deneen is some deep meditation on Spinoza and the stoics who came before him. There are human hierarchies and traditions that are deeper than his Pre-enlightenment wet dream. The perennial drive for individual and collective freedom is one of those traditions. Hierarchies are a systematic prioritization of interests and liberalism clearly has its own hierarchy of values that encourage human flourishing.
He's not arguing about whether liberal societies are wealthier or freer, but whether those outcomes are good. From a post-liberal, religious conservative view, liberal “successes” are seen as morally negative. They erode authority, hierarchy, and tradition in favor of individual autonomy.
That’s why statistics about prosperity or happiness don’t address his case.
Responding to his critique would require a coherent secular philosophical framework and we don't have anything like that anywhere near the mainstream. Liberals are struggling to even define the term "liberal," let alone presenting any coherent arguments. Most people calling themselves liberal today are in fact socialists, so just more authoritarians anyway.
This also explains why claiming that he offers “no program” misses the point. His project is currently preparatory. Delegitimize liberalism morally and clear space for alternatives grounded in authority and tradition. Once liberalism is treated as hollow, the range of acceptable political action expands on its own.
The real issue is that his moral arguments face little opposition.
"Responding to his critique would require a coherent secular philosophical framework and we don't have anything like that anywhere near the mainstream. Liberals are struggling to even define the term "liberal," let alone presenting any coherent arguments"
This may be true for the rank and file liberals, but it's completely untrue in general. Many of the 18th-21st century's best thinkers put forth their own coherent, secular philosophical frameworks for liberalism, which run the gamut from more "conservative" liberals like Hayek, "moderate" liberals like Popper, to more "liberal" liberals like Amartya Sen. The best and clearest example is probably Rawls's "Political Liberalism," which wipes the floor with anything Deenan has written.
Even in the more pop-philosophy sphere and on social media, you'll see writers like Joseph Heath, Matt Yglesias, and others presenting coherent Rawlsian definitions of liberalism, often defending it against those on the "illiberal" liberal political wing.
I think this actually illustrates the problem. Listing figures as different as Hayek and Rawls under the same “liberal” banner avoids the question of what liberalism is meant to defend.
Rawls, in particular, isn’t an alternative to Deneen so much as a secular version. Where Deneen grounds political authority in the collectivist ideas of religion and tradition, Rawls grounds it in things like "public institutions." In both cases, the interests of the individual are sacrificed to a collective political system. So, I don't think Rawls "wipes the floor" with anything Deneen has written. He's offering the same thing, but with different branding.
Opposing that requires a principled defense of individual rights and rights-protecting government in politics, which means capitalism in economics. That position has very little presence in today's political discourse, which is why both religious and secular authoritarians face so little effective resistance.
Hayek is a better example, but has large philosophical gaps, and is left trying to reverse engineer political inputs from the economic outputs of politics, getting it fundamentally backwards.
What’s missing across the board is a clear, morally grounded account of why individual autonomy should be treated as fundamental in politics, rather than conditional on something (whether it be God, the environment, the proletariat, the race, etc).
It's possible I've misunderstood Deenan, I'll admit I've never been able to make it through the entirety of any of his works because I've gotten frustrated with unsupported arguments and rhetorical hot air.
I have, however, read Rawls, and I strongly disagree with the characterization that it's the same as what Deenan is offering. A key point, which Rawls spends about a third of Political Liberalism explaining, is that the public institutions he is considering derive their legitimacy from a rational process engaged in by reasonable, autonomous individuals. The moral basis, ultimately, is the dignity of the individual and their rights and responsibilities as citizens. The combination of the dignity of the autonomous individual plus the legitimacy of a rational, reasonable process produces valid institutions, with the understanding that those institutions are flexible and evolve over time in response to the political body.
That's why I have no issue lumping him in with Hayek, along with others on the "opposite" side of the spectrum such as his nemesis Nozick, because while they disagree on the implications of grounding the political project on individual autonomy in areas such as egalitarianism, property rights, and the acceptable exercise of collective power, all of them explicitly ground their moral framework within the individual. "Treating the individual as an ends rather than a means" is the hallmark of the liberal ideal.
If Deenan is actually doing that, regardless of the conclusions he draws from it, then he's not a postliberal, he's just a liberal with a bit of cynicism and RETVRN ideology thrown in- which, IMO, most self-described postliberals actually are.
Now, there are plenty of thinkers often described as "liberal" who don't fit the "individuals as ends, not as means" mold- John Stuart Mill comes to mind- that instead engage with utilitarianism in a greater or lesser degree. Mill is an interesting case because there are some fundamental contradictions (IMO) between his emphasis on liberty and his utilitarianism that are more clear to us with the benefit of hindsight of some of the great, failed utilitarian/coercive experiments of the 20th century. The dual goal of liberty and progress, and the failure to reckon with their contradictions, is the source of a lot of the incoherence of the modern left.
My general impression of this postliberal intellectual movement is that it's focused on pointing out contradictions and failures of that second type of "liberalism", which preaches liberty and democracy but also wants to use the coercive power of the state to achieve social (utilitarian) goals. There are plenty of fair critiques in that, many of them previously made by liberal thinkers like Hayek, and plenty of bad-faith lightweight vibes-driven populists. The fact that most of what I've seen from Deenan falls into the latter category is why I've had such a strong negative reaction to his writing. I think it's a mistake to equate "modern leftism is incoherent and lacks a consistent moral foundation" with "liberalism has failed."
Liberalism, properly defined, has a well-established intellectual tradition which is both coherent in its core values and flexible enough to accommodate diverse interpretations. However, I do agree with you that that tradition does not have many loud voices advocating for it in the current mainstream political discourse.
What I’m pointing out is that in terms of fundamentals, “liberal” is often used today to mean things like socialism. This is not an alternative to Deneen’s authoritarianism, it's just a secular version of the same thing.
Classical liberalism has a clear definition: it's a rights-protecting political system. And a system that protects rights necessarily supports economic freedom, which means capitalism. Any political system that doesn't create these conditions is on the same side as Deneen, regardless of any other details.
Liberalism is a confusing term, no doubt, and some do conflate it with socialism for two entirely different reasons (1) Statist progressives call themselves liberals (2) Those influenced by Objectivism conflate the search for the common good with collectivism because they think there is no common good, only individual good. That is a mistake because humans do have a common nature and some basic goods/principles serve all individuals. But what that is is contested and the job of politics is to lay out the rules and procedures for hammering a consensus about what that common good is. However, since consensus does not mean unanimity, those whose conception loses or is not embraced by others, take to questioning and delegitimizing the politcal process itself. It is not enough for them that the conversation is guided by a bedrock conviction that politics should consider individuals an end in themselves. They want every individual to get his or her way on what suits them best. This is a profoundly misguided and ultimately demand that makes social living impossible. That's why for libertarians, individualism leads to "anarchy"
Thanks for laying this out so thoroughly. I appreciate the care you take in defending liberal institutions and in warning about the very real dangers of authoritarianism. There’s a lot here that’s serious and worth engaging with in good faith.
Diagnostic question:
If liberalism is uniquely capable of self-correction, what concrete mechanisms are currently functioning to restore trust among citizens who feel persistently unrepresented rather than merely warning them about worse alternatives?
Boundary question:
At what point does treating liberalism as the only viable framework risk turning it from a governing philosophy into a closed moral perimeter—where structural critique is interpreted as anti-democratic by definition?
Falsifiability question:
What empirical conditions would count as evidence that liberal institutions themselves—not just illiberal actors—are contributing to democratic erosion, rather than simply failing to contain it?
Every one of Deneen’s tired, weak ideas was identified and dispatched by Stephen Holmes in the brilliant _Anatomy of Antiliberalism,_ years before Deneen even imagined he had an idea. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674031852
Certainly one fatal flaw I see in modern (neo-)liberalism is that it does not and can not create the kind of people and therefore culture on which itself rests upon. I see the (neo-)liberal elite of our western civilization to be totally blindsided by the irrationality of the public lending power to their own orange-colored demise as well as incredulous and impotent against the destruction of the formal and informal institutions that make a liberal-democratic system work. Liberalisms corrosive power to dissolve traditions, values and virtues has made itself extremely vulnerable to attacks by the nihilistic and chaotic forces of the dark passions in the age of social media.
Liberalisms process of "liberating" people from oppressive institutions has produced a kind of people that will either allow Liberalism to devour itself or be destroyed by the undead ghouls necromanced by the foolish offspring of liberalism (looking at you Objectivism and Libertarianism). What started out as political and economic liberation spread into all areas of human life and psyche. It recently reached an extreme point where now liberation from biological determinants like sex is considered a worthwile goal and a moral imperative. However the true end will be the liberation from human being itself, which Bond villains like Thiel already openly fantasize about. The snake eating it's own tail.
Just ask yourself what kind of a society and people do you get when a culture posits greed, pursuit of self-interest and self-actualisation, pleasure-seeking and maximising one's own benefit as the highest moral imperatives? Does anybody really believe you will get rational and virtuous people that behave civilized and tolerant? People that care for the maintenance and continuance of culture and society? Also what kind of politicians and political operatives do you get, when the political system rewards theatrics, dishonesty, manipulation, lies and deception? Is it any wonder people become disillusioned, cynical and in the end nihilistic enough to agree to the euthanisation of this system?
Liberalism will have to contend with this again and listen carefully to its critics or it will triumph itself to death. However this critical process needs to be postponed for now. Right now it is imperative that a broad public coalition is built, led by an elite to fight united against the authoritarian revolution by the post-truth nihilists and power-mad megalomaniacs.
You can not do this, when you believe this to be true:
"In fact, liberalism exists to peacefully manage conflict between many competing political plans. It allows people under it to hold whatever views they want—Marxism, libertarianism, evangelicalism, atheism—so long as they observe the rule of law and refrain from forcing their views on others."
Liberalism can not be both, a neutral mediator between world views and itself the dominating worldview.
The US constitution and any other constitution for that matter, as well as any other contrived social system is always contingent on unwritten institutions (norms, rules, customs, values, virtues etc. manifested by a people) it can not itself create. Prerequisites are always baked in the cake. No human is a blank slate, as is no elite, as is no society. Communism sounds great on paper too until you try to implement it.
If liberal institutions were really based in the reality of human nature, they would not fail against literal insane hogwash. However watch how all these institutions are crumbling right now by the onslaught of literal madhouse inmates and their profiteering billionaire handlers.
By the way, if I sound like I defend Deneen, who I haven't read, or "post-liberalism", I do not. The same critique applies to what is described as "post-liberalisms" goal of building a pre-liberal world. I agree with the closing paragraphs.
Path-dependencies are real. Ignore them and you/a society will fall off that mountain.
Liberalism has to adapt to effectively counter the anti-civilizational forces that threaten us. The liberal elite has to leave the position as manager and ascend to the position of leader and champion again. For that it has to find a new, appealing political formula, a narrative that inspires and immunises against the allures of the dark side. "Everyone will be rich!" or "Everyone can be whatever they want to be" doesn't cut it anymore.
Contraverse, you offer a fascinating critique -- but (as per the shortcoming Matt Johnson notes in Deneen) -- you, too offer diagnosis, while -- for good reason -- remaining somewhat nebulous about the cure.
"The liberal elite has to leave the position as manager and ascend to the position of leader and champion again"? From your mouth to God's ear!
Yes, liberalism "has to find a new, appealing political formula, a narrative that inspires and immunises against the allures of the dark side" -- but how is that to happen? Who is to "ascend to the position of leader and champion" without (in the process) becoming authoritarian him/herself (or reverting to the bloodless legalism [and scientistic managerialism -- with its ceremonious hierarchies of "expertise"] that's left us in this pickle in the first place)?
Where is the "leader and champion" with the appeal of a McMurphy, ready to take over when they fire Nurse Ratched?
In my gloomier moments, I see this problem as cyclical -- as in the view of Vico or Ibn Khakdun. Liberalism (or modernity) has had a good run, but all social orders ossiify. This time, perhaps, homo sapiens is about to lose its (ecological) niche (in information or language) as the planet's apex predator.
As attributed to George Washington (inscribed on his memorial arch in New York): "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God."
That's a tall order. This time around, we seem to need a Messiah. Meanwhile, we're on our own.
It can't replace liberalism because it's not "post-liberalism", it's PRE-liberalism. It does not reject the 'liberalism' (i.e. social democracy) of FDR and LBJ, it rejects the liberalism of Locke, Jefferson and Franklin. The central thesis is that liberalism is tired and unsuited to the modern world, and the solution is to replace it with monarchical systems which liberalism replaced because they were tired and unsuited to the contemporary world.
I suspect that many post-liberals are mostly aggrieved that so many Americans do not share their religious beliefs, and they try to argue that it's really other things they're concerned about, and those things would all be better if we had a society organized around "tradition" that should not be challenged, and "community" where everyone professes the same beliefs.
I saw a reactionary who's less intelligent than Deneen try to make all of history (or the little he knows of it) conform to the thesis that the most vital societies are characterized by "religious solidarity," a euphemism for creedal conformity (backed up by the power of the state). It was easy to poke holes in every example provided.
Not so fast Matt. This applies to you also https://oswald67.substack.com/p/savaged-by-a-dead-sheep-andrew-koppelmans?r=2r3au
My, my, someone has quite the bee in their bonnet. Please educate us, Patrick, about these spectral ‘they’ who belong the deracinated ‘laptop class’. We’ve heard these rants before, about the perfidy of cosmopolitan elites.
For extended demolition, I strongly recommend looking at Matt Sleat’s new book Post-Liberalism. Though he makes clear that the truly insane and scary one is Adrian Vermuel
As always, these people use the platform and tools the were given to them by Liberal Democracy to tell us why it is must be abandoned.
Johnson's piece nails Deneen's failure to offer a coherent prescription, but I think it misses a deeper irony about why postliberalism resonates in the first place. I've spent years puzzling over something Erich Fromm wrote about in 1941 that feels uncomfortably relevant now: the psychological burden of freedom itself. Fromm was trying to understand why whole societies willingly surrendered liberty to authoritarians, and his answer wasn't that they were ignorant or coerced. They were exhausted. The breakdown of traditional structures left individuals unmoored, and authoritarian movements offered something liberalism couldn't easily provide on its own, namely, a sense of belonging, certainty, and meaning.
Deneen diagnoses something real even if his cure is poison. Since 1991, we've experienced what I've started calling the Great Unraveling, the compounding dissolution of family, community, civic institutions, and shared national identity. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory formally declared loneliness an epidemic; isolation raises premature death risk by 26 percent, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes daily. Between 2003 and 2020 the time Americans spent with friends dropped by 67 percent. Nearly half of Americans now report having fewer than four close friends compared to just 27 percent in 1990.
Postliberalism thrives in this void not because its intellectual framework is sound but because it speaks to an existential ache that liberalism's defenders often dismiss. Trump's promise to bring back our jobs, our borders, our wealth is psychologically potent precisely because it offers collective certainty in exchange for the burden of freedom. As Fromm put it, the strongman who claims he can reinstate lost institutions offers an illusion, he cannot recreate what has been lost, and his authoritarian rule only deepens the psychological alienation. But illusions sell when the alternative is anomie.
The question liberals need to answer isn't just why Deneen is wrong. It's what institutions of belonging we're prepared to build.
Reactionary responses and proposing old ideas that have been disproven? I don't think it's a coincidence that Deneen and Amy Coney Barrett came from the same dismal campus.
Deneen and others like him invented the concept of the “woke mind virus”. Seems it mutated to a brainwashed version, doesn’t it?
One of the unintended, but inevitable, consequences of capitalism is the dissolution of hierarchies and traditions. And once dissolved they cannot be restored in any organic sense. The Humpty Dumpty syndrome. Deneen like those of his fellow travelers have some great restoration project in mind but meanwhile the god of economic destruction and creation dances on as it wills. The world we live in has more to do with amoral markets than any sort of morality. Appeals to authoritarianism will not solve anything. One of the features of most authoritarian governments is the thriving "black and grey" markets that meet consumer demands.
So like all reactionaries like Deneen they are prioritizing a fantasy of bringing back a golden age of hierarchies and traditions that never really existed outside of a cinema. But they earn a good living when people buy their books, ask them to speak at conferences and share their "perspective" (opinions informed or not) as paid pundits.
My suggestion for Deneen is some deep meditation on Spinoza and the stoics who came before him. There are human hierarchies and traditions that are deeper than his Pre-enlightenment wet dream. The perennial drive for individual and collective freedom is one of those traditions. Hierarchies are a systematic prioritization of interests and liberalism clearly has its own hierarchy of values that encourage human flourishing.
I think this article misreads Deneen.
He's not arguing about whether liberal societies are wealthier or freer, but whether those outcomes are good. From a post-liberal, religious conservative view, liberal “successes” are seen as morally negative. They erode authority, hierarchy, and tradition in favor of individual autonomy.
That’s why statistics about prosperity or happiness don’t address his case.
Responding to his critique would require a coherent secular philosophical framework and we don't have anything like that anywhere near the mainstream. Liberals are struggling to even define the term "liberal," let alone presenting any coherent arguments. Most people calling themselves liberal today are in fact socialists, so just more authoritarians anyway.
This also explains why claiming that he offers “no program” misses the point. His project is currently preparatory. Delegitimize liberalism morally and clear space for alternatives grounded in authority and tradition. Once liberalism is treated as hollow, the range of acceptable political action expands on its own.
The real issue is that his moral arguments face little opposition.
"Responding to his critique would require a coherent secular philosophical framework and we don't have anything like that anywhere near the mainstream. Liberals are struggling to even define the term "liberal," let alone presenting any coherent arguments"
This may be true for the rank and file liberals, but it's completely untrue in general. Many of the 18th-21st century's best thinkers put forth their own coherent, secular philosophical frameworks for liberalism, which run the gamut from more "conservative" liberals like Hayek, "moderate" liberals like Popper, to more "liberal" liberals like Amartya Sen. The best and clearest example is probably Rawls's "Political Liberalism," which wipes the floor with anything Deenan has written.
Even in the more pop-philosophy sphere and on social media, you'll see writers like Joseph Heath, Matt Yglesias, and others presenting coherent Rawlsian definitions of liberalism, often defending it against those on the "illiberal" liberal political wing.
I think this actually illustrates the problem. Listing figures as different as Hayek and Rawls under the same “liberal” banner avoids the question of what liberalism is meant to defend.
Rawls, in particular, isn’t an alternative to Deneen so much as a secular version. Where Deneen grounds political authority in the collectivist ideas of religion and tradition, Rawls grounds it in things like "public institutions." In both cases, the interests of the individual are sacrificed to a collective political system. So, I don't think Rawls "wipes the floor" with anything Deneen has written. He's offering the same thing, but with different branding.
Opposing that requires a principled defense of individual rights and rights-protecting government in politics, which means capitalism in economics. That position has very little presence in today's political discourse, which is why both religious and secular authoritarians face so little effective resistance.
Hayek is a better example, but has large philosophical gaps, and is left trying to reverse engineer political inputs from the economic outputs of politics, getting it fundamentally backwards.
What’s missing across the board is a clear, morally grounded account of why individual autonomy should be treated as fundamental in politics, rather than conditional on something (whether it be God, the environment, the proletariat, the race, etc).
It's possible I've misunderstood Deenan, I'll admit I've never been able to make it through the entirety of any of his works because I've gotten frustrated with unsupported arguments and rhetorical hot air.
I have, however, read Rawls, and I strongly disagree with the characterization that it's the same as what Deenan is offering. A key point, which Rawls spends about a third of Political Liberalism explaining, is that the public institutions he is considering derive their legitimacy from a rational process engaged in by reasonable, autonomous individuals. The moral basis, ultimately, is the dignity of the individual and their rights and responsibilities as citizens. The combination of the dignity of the autonomous individual plus the legitimacy of a rational, reasonable process produces valid institutions, with the understanding that those institutions are flexible and evolve over time in response to the political body.
That's why I have no issue lumping him in with Hayek, along with others on the "opposite" side of the spectrum such as his nemesis Nozick, because while they disagree on the implications of grounding the political project on individual autonomy in areas such as egalitarianism, property rights, and the acceptable exercise of collective power, all of them explicitly ground their moral framework within the individual. "Treating the individual as an ends rather than a means" is the hallmark of the liberal ideal.
If Deenan is actually doing that, regardless of the conclusions he draws from it, then he's not a postliberal, he's just a liberal with a bit of cynicism and RETVRN ideology thrown in- which, IMO, most self-described postliberals actually are.
Now, there are plenty of thinkers often described as "liberal" who don't fit the "individuals as ends, not as means" mold- John Stuart Mill comes to mind- that instead engage with utilitarianism in a greater or lesser degree. Mill is an interesting case because there are some fundamental contradictions (IMO) between his emphasis on liberty and his utilitarianism that are more clear to us with the benefit of hindsight of some of the great, failed utilitarian/coercive experiments of the 20th century. The dual goal of liberty and progress, and the failure to reckon with their contradictions, is the source of a lot of the incoherence of the modern left.
My general impression of this postliberal intellectual movement is that it's focused on pointing out contradictions and failures of that second type of "liberalism", which preaches liberty and democracy but also wants to use the coercive power of the state to achieve social (utilitarian) goals. There are plenty of fair critiques in that, many of them previously made by liberal thinkers like Hayek, and plenty of bad-faith lightweight vibes-driven populists. The fact that most of what I've seen from Deenan falls into the latter category is why I've had such a strong negative reaction to his writing. I think it's a mistake to equate "modern leftism is incoherent and lacks a consistent moral foundation" with "liberalism has failed."
Liberalism, properly defined, has a well-established intellectual tradition which is both coherent in its core values and flexible enough to accommodate diverse interpretations. However, I do agree with you that that tradition does not have many loud voices advocating for it in the current mainstream political discourse.
Brilliant comment.
Thanks!
Agreed. Excellent point, Mr. Turnip!
What I’m pointing out is that in terms of fundamentals, “liberal” is often used today to mean things like socialism. This is not an alternative to Deneen’s authoritarianism, it's just a secular version of the same thing.
Classical liberalism has a clear definition: it's a rights-protecting political system. And a system that protects rights necessarily supports economic freedom, which means capitalism. Any political system that doesn't create these conditions is on the same side as Deneen, regardless of any other details.
Liberalism is a confusing term, no doubt, and some do conflate it with socialism for two entirely different reasons (1) Statist progressives call themselves liberals (2) Those influenced by Objectivism conflate the search for the common good with collectivism because they think there is no common good, only individual good. That is a mistake because humans do have a common nature and some basic goods/principles serve all individuals. But what that is is contested and the job of politics is to lay out the rules and procedures for hammering a consensus about what that common good is. However, since consensus does not mean unanimity, those whose conception loses or is not embraced by others, take to questioning and delegitimizing the politcal process itself. It is not enough for them that the conversation is guided by a bedrock conviction that politics should consider individuals an end in themselves. They want every individual to get his or her way on what suits them best. This is a profoundly misguided and ultimately demand that makes social living impossible. That's why for libertarians, individualism leads to "anarchy"
I see where you're coming from, but I also think something like the LDS church is only possible in America
Thanks for laying this out so thoroughly. I appreciate the care you take in defending liberal institutions and in warning about the very real dangers of authoritarianism. There’s a lot here that’s serious and worth engaging with in good faith.
Diagnostic question:
If liberalism is uniquely capable of self-correction, what concrete mechanisms are currently functioning to restore trust among citizens who feel persistently unrepresented rather than merely warning them about worse alternatives?
Boundary question:
At what point does treating liberalism as the only viable framework risk turning it from a governing philosophy into a closed moral perimeter—where structural critique is interpreted as anti-democratic by definition?
Falsifiability question:
What empirical conditions would count as evidence that liberal institutions themselves—not just illiberal actors—are contributing to democratic erosion, rather than simply failing to contain it?
Thanks!!!😊
Every one of Deneen’s tired, weak ideas was identified and dispatched by Stephen Holmes in the brilliant _Anatomy of Antiliberalism,_ years before Deneen even imagined he had an idea. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674031852
Liberalism has failed because it adopted the universalist assumptions of the 1648 Westphalian state. There is an alternative: https://store.mises.org/Constitution-of-Non-state-Government-Field-Guide-to-Texas-Secession-P11264.aspx#reviewsPane
Certainly one fatal flaw I see in modern (neo-)liberalism is that it does not and can not create the kind of people and therefore culture on which itself rests upon. I see the (neo-)liberal elite of our western civilization to be totally blindsided by the irrationality of the public lending power to their own orange-colored demise as well as incredulous and impotent against the destruction of the formal and informal institutions that make a liberal-democratic system work. Liberalisms corrosive power to dissolve traditions, values and virtues has made itself extremely vulnerable to attacks by the nihilistic and chaotic forces of the dark passions in the age of social media.
Liberalisms process of "liberating" people from oppressive institutions has produced a kind of people that will either allow Liberalism to devour itself or be destroyed by the undead ghouls necromanced by the foolish offspring of liberalism (looking at you Objectivism and Libertarianism). What started out as political and economic liberation spread into all areas of human life and psyche. It recently reached an extreme point where now liberation from biological determinants like sex is considered a worthwile goal and a moral imperative. However the true end will be the liberation from human being itself, which Bond villains like Thiel already openly fantasize about. The snake eating it's own tail.
Just ask yourself what kind of a society and people do you get when a culture posits greed, pursuit of self-interest and self-actualisation, pleasure-seeking and maximising one's own benefit as the highest moral imperatives? Does anybody really believe you will get rational and virtuous people that behave civilized and tolerant? People that care for the maintenance and continuance of culture and society? Also what kind of politicians and political operatives do you get, when the political system rewards theatrics, dishonesty, manipulation, lies and deception? Is it any wonder people become disillusioned, cynical and in the end nihilistic enough to agree to the euthanisation of this system?
Liberalism will have to contend with this again and listen carefully to its critics or it will triumph itself to death. However this critical process needs to be postponed for now. Right now it is imperative that a broad public coalition is built, led by an elite to fight united against the authoritarian revolution by the post-truth nihilists and power-mad megalomaniacs.
You can not do this, when you believe this to be true:
"In fact, liberalism exists to peacefully manage conflict between many competing political plans. It allows people under it to hold whatever views they want—Marxism, libertarianism, evangelicalism, atheism—so long as they observe the rule of law and refrain from forcing their views on others."
Liberalism can not be both, a neutral mediator between world views and itself the dominating worldview.
The US constitution and any other constitution for that matter, as well as any other contrived social system is always contingent on unwritten institutions (norms, rules, customs, values, virtues etc. manifested by a people) it can not itself create. Prerequisites are always baked in the cake. No human is a blank slate, as is no elite, as is no society. Communism sounds great on paper too until you try to implement it.
If liberal institutions were really based in the reality of human nature, they would not fail against literal insane hogwash. However watch how all these institutions are crumbling right now by the onslaught of literal madhouse inmates and their profiteering billionaire handlers.
By the way, if I sound like I defend Deneen, who I haven't read, or "post-liberalism", I do not. The same critique applies to what is described as "post-liberalisms" goal of building a pre-liberal world. I agree with the closing paragraphs.
Path-dependencies are real. Ignore them and you/a society will fall off that mountain.
Liberalism has to adapt to effectively counter the anti-civilizational forces that threaten us. The liberal elite has to leave the position as manager and ascend to the position of leader and champion again. For that it has to find a new, appealing political formula, a narrative that inspires and immunises against the allures of the dark side. "Everyone will be rich!" or "Everyone can be whatever they want to be" doesn't cut it anymore.
Contraverse, you offer a fascinating critique -- but (as per the shortcoming Matt Johnson notes in Deneen) -- you, too offer diagnosis, while -- for good reason -- remaining somewhat nebulous about the cure.
"The liberal elite has to leave the position as manager and ascend to the position of leader and champion again"? From your mouth to God's ear!
Yes, liberalism "has to find a new, appealing political formula, a narrative that inspires and immunises against the allures of the dark side" -- but how is that to happen? Who is to "ascend to the position of leader and champion" without (in the process) becoming authoritarian him/herself (or reverting to the bloodless legalism [and scientistic managerialism -- with its ceremonious hierarchies of "expertise"] that's left us in this pickle in the first place)?
Where is the "leader and champion" with the appeal of a McMurphy, ready to take over when they fire Nurse Ratched?
In my gloomier moments, I see this problem as cyclical -- as in the view of Vico or Ibn Khakdun. Liberalism (or modernity) has had a good run, but all social orders ossiify. This time, perhaps, homo sapiens is about to lose its (ecological) niche (in information or language) as the planet's apex predator.
As attributed to George Washington (inscribed on his memorial arch in New York): "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God."
That's a tall order. This time around, we seem to need a Messiah. Meanwhile, we're on our own.
It can't replace liberalism because it's not "post-liberalism", it's PRE-liberalism. It does not reject the 'liberalism' (i.e. social democracy) of FDR and LBJ, it rejects the liberalism of Locke, Jefferson and Franklin. The central thesis is that liberalism is tired and unsuited to the modern world, and the solution is to replace it with monarchical systems which liberalism replaced because they were tired and unsuited to the contemporary world.
I suspect that many post-liberals are mostly aggrieved that so many Americans do not share their religious beliefs, and they try to argue that it's really other things they're concerned about, and those things would all be better if we had a society organized around "tradition" that should not be challenged, and "community" where everyone professes the same beliefs.
I saw a reactionary who's less intelligent than Deneen try to make all of history (or the little he knows of it) conform to the thesis that the most vital societies are characterized by "religious solidarity," a euphemism for creedal conformity (backed up by the power of the state). It was easy to poke holes in every example provided.
Good stuff. Deneen is another genius who wants to explain to us what is so obvious to him, who knows better than the founding fathers did.