Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

While the “Life of Julia” campaign seemed thus designed for liberals who generally supported government programs that helped foster economic opportunity and greater equality, Julia was nevertheless someone who could not be an object of admiration without the background appeal of conservative liberalism’s valorization of the autonomous individual as the normative ideal of human liberty. If the positive portrayal of Julia’s extensive reliance upon government aid tended to make the right blind to the ad’s fundamentally liberal ideal of autonomy, the left was barely cognizant that the aim of this assistance was to create the most perfectly autonomous individual since Hobbes and Locke dreamed up the State of Nature. In Julia’s world there are only Julia and the government, with the very brief exception of a young child who appears in one slide—with no evident father—and is quickly whisked away by a government-sponsored yellow bus, never to be seen again. Otherwise, Julia has achieved a life of perfect autonomy, courtesy of a massive, sometimes intrusive, always solicitous, ever-present government.