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
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.
Deneen confuses "a world in which stuff I don't like won't exist" with a theocratic dictatorship. This might not be brutal. It will more likely be mediocre and dull as fuck. All these integralists think it's gonna be all Palestrina and Chartres and Aquinas and chivalry and defeating Sauron. More likely it will be Ireland in the '50s, a place in which people were desperate to get out of they weren't too depressed. Who in Ireland now pines for a time when politicians had to suck up to the clergy (which was not dominated by the best: the best got the hell out)?
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.
I completely agree with this critique of post-liberalism. This line in particular is worth emphasising: 'The effort to force 340 million diverse Americans to accept a narrow, postliberal-approved definition of the “common good” would be terrifyingly oppressive if it wasn’t fundamentally unworkable.' It is a reminder of why the pluralism and tolerance of liberalism are so crucial - they are an antidote to stifling conformity and authoritarianism. Yet there is, unfortunately, a glimmer of truth in Deneen's writing. Deneen attacks liberalism for promoting a hyper-individualism which is spiritually bankrupt. In 'Why Liberalism Failed', he writes that liberalism leads to 'increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.' I do think that humans yearn for a collective identity or community membership, some higher guiding purpose in life that goes beyond self-actualisation or success. Ultimately, liberalism's pluralism is both its greatest strength and a gnawing weakness.
Thanks for this article and for calling out "post-liberalism" which is somehow becoming a philosophy, not just a catchy phrase, among many conservative essayists. As I understand it - and it's a fairly incoherent philosophy, so good luck reaching a clear understanding... - it boils down to ending minority/individual freedoms in order to propagate some sort of greater "truth." So go ahead and ban speech that says the "wrong" things; limit religious practices that aren't what I am certain is God's will; maybe even end elections once the "right" people are voted in... Obviously, that's a dangerous kind of politics, and its exponents often root it in an overconfident, know-it-all worldview and grossly distorted views of religion and early American history. And it isn't novel - our Founders recognized illiberalism (which is really all that "post-liberalism" is) as opening the door to persecution. But post-liberalism is undeniably becoming trendy, so the rest of us need to be familiar with it so that we can recognize those who espouse it and stop them from attaining power.
"So go ahead and ban speech that says the 'wrong' things"? Did someone say something about "misgendering" -- or "hate" speech, or "microaggressions"? Deneen isn't the only guardian of orthodoxy around here these days.
Liberalism isn't designed to avoid making anyone uncomfortable (even in the name of being "respecful" or "polite"). In fact, that very recognition might be what we discover we have in common: we're all exiles on Main Street. "Live and let live" isn't easy.
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.
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?
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"
Left to its own devices capitalism commodifies everything as inputs to its goal of profit, public land gets enclosed so that forests can be reduced to timber farms, prairies to fields of inedible corn, citizens to consumers, all to ensure the wealthiest get wealthier while externalizing the costs to governments, societies, and the earth.
Capitalism deconstructs all it touches for profit, and liberalism tends to moderate those effects while modern conservatism seeks to unleash them...and *that's* the real reason Deneen's project takes the form it does.
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
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
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 reviewed Deneen’s book, Regime Change, for Arc when it came out, and came to similar conclusions:
https://www.arcdigital.media/p/this-is-what-happens-when-you-find
I'd forgotten about Arc Digital! It's 2019 again…
Nick Grossman still publishes pieces there occasionally.
Deneen confuses "a world in which stuff I don't like won't exist" with a theocratic dictatorship. This might not be brutal. It will more likely be mediocre and dull as fuck. All these integralists think it's gonna be all Palestrina and Chartres and Aquinas and chivalry and defeating Sauron. More likely it will be Ireland in the '50s, a place in which people were desperate to get out of they weren't too depressed. Who in Ireland now pines for a time when politicians had to suck up to the clergy (which was not dominated by the best: the best got the hell out)?
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.
I completely agree with this critique of post-liberalism. This line in particular is worth emphasising: 'The effort to force 340 million diverse Americans to accept a narrow, postliberal-approved definition of the “common good” would be terrifyingly oppressive if it wasn’t fundamentally unworkable.' It is a reminder of why the pluralism and tolerance of liberalism are so crucial - they are an antidote to stifling conformity and authoritarianism. Yet there is, unfortunately, a glimmer of truth in Deneen's writing. Deneen attacks liberalism for promoting a hyper-individualism which is spiritually bankrupt. In 'Why Liberalism Failed', he writes that liberalism leads to 'increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.' I do think that humans yearn for a collective identity or community membership, some higher guiding purpose in life that goes beyond self-actualisation or success. Ultimately, liberalism's pluralism is both its greatest strength and a gnawing weakness.
Thanks for this article and for calling out "post-liberalism" which is somehow becoming a philosophy, not just a catchy phrase, among many conservative essayists. As I understand it - and it's a fairly incoherent philosophy, so good luck reaching a clear understanding... - it boils down to ending minority/individual freedoms in order to propagate some sort of greater "truth." So go ahead and ban speech that says the "wrong" things; limit religious practices that aren't what I am certain is God's will; maybe even end elections once the "right" people are voted in... Obviously, that's a dangerous kind of politics, and its exponents often root it in an overconfident, know-it-all worldview and grossly distorted views of religion and early American history. And it isn't novel - our Founders recognized illiberalism (which is really all that "post-liberalism" is) as opening the door to persecution. But post-liberalism is undeniably becoming trendy, so the rest of us need to be familiar with it so that we can recognize those who espouse it and stop them from attaining power.
"So go ahead and ban speech that says the 'wrong' things"? Did someone say something about "misgendering" -- or "hate" speech, or "microaggressions"? Deneen isn't the only guardian of orthodoxy around here these days.
Liberalism isn't designed to avoid making anyone uncomfortable (even in the name of being "respecful" or "polite"). In fact, that very recognition might be what we discover we have in common: we're all exiles on Main Street. "Live and let live" isn't easy.
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.
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!!!😊
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.
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
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
Deneen confuses "liberalism" with "capitalism."
Left to its own devices capitalism commodifies everything as inputs to its goal of profit, public land gets enclosed so that forests can be reduced to timber farms, prairies to fields of inedible corn, citizens to consumers, all to ensure the wealthiest get wealthier while externalizing the costs to governments, societies, and the earth.
Capitalism deconstructs all it touches for profit, and liberalism tends to moderate those effects while modern conservatism seeks to unleash them...and *that's* the real reason Deneen's project takes the form it does.
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.