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.

While “conservative” liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that might limit the market’s role in the life of a community.16 And while “progressive” liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to enforcement of “manners and morals,” preferring the open marketplace of individual “buyers and sellers,” especially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over ending one’s own life.

At the heart of liberal theory and practice is the preeminent role of the state as agent of individualism. This very liberation in turn generates liberalism’s self-reinforcing circle, wherein the increasingly disembedded individual ends up strengthening the state that is its own author. From the perspective of liberalism, it is a virtuous circle, but from the standpoint of human flourishing, it is one of the deepest sources of liberal pathology.

As naturally political and social creatures, people require a thick set of constitutive bonds in order to function as fully formed human beings. Shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon their autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the state.

The individualism arising from the philosophy and practice of liberalism, far from fundamentally opposing an increasingly centralized state, both required it and in fact increased its power. Indeed, individualism and statism have powerfully combined to all but rout the vestiges of pre- and often nonliberal communities animated by a philosophy and practice distinct from statist individualism. Today’s classical liberals and progressive liberals remain locked in a battle for their preferred end game—whether we will be a society of ever more perfectly liberated, autonomous individuals or ever more egalitarian members of the global “community”—but while this debate continues apace, the two sides agree on their end while absorbing our attention in disputes over the means, thus combining in a pincer movement to destroy the vestiges of the classical practices and virtues that they both despise.

The expansion of liberalism rests upon a vicious and reinforcing cycle in which state expansion secures the end of individual fragmentation, in turn requiring further state expansion to control a society without shared norms, practices, or beliefs.

Liberalism thus increasingly requires a legal and administrative regime, driven by the imperative of replacing all nonliberal forms of support for human flourishing (such as schools, medicine, and charity), and hollowing any de...

The ways in which the individualist philosophy of classical liberalism and the statist philosophy of progressive liberalism end up reinforcing each other often go undetected. Although conservative liberals claim to defend not only a free market but family values and federalism, the only part of the conservative agenda that has been continuously and successfully implemented during their recent political ascendance is economic liberalism, including deregulation, globalization, and the protection of titanic economic inequalities. And while progressive liberals claim to advance a shared sense of national destiny and solidarity that should decrease the advance of an individualist economy and reduce income inequality, the only part of the left’s political agenda that has triumphed has been the project of personal and especially sexual autonomy. Is it mere coincidence that both parties, despite their claims to be locked in a political death grip, mutually advance the cause of liberal autonomy and inequality?

THE dual expansion of the state and personal autonomy rests extensively on the weakening and eventual loss of particular cultures, and their replacement not by a single liberal culture but by a pervasive and encompassing anticulture. What is popularly called a “culture,” often modified by an adjective—for instance, “pop culture” or “media culture” or “multiculturalism”—is in fact a sign of the evisceration of culture as a set of generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and particular settings.

As Mario Vargas Llosa has written, “The idea of culture has broadened to such an extent that, although nobody has dared to say this explicitly, it has disappeared. It has become an ungraspable, multitudinous and figurative ghost.”

The liturgies of nation and market are woven closely together (the apogee of which is the celebration of commercials during the Super Bowl), simultaneously nationalist and consumerist celebrations of abstracted membership that reify individuated selves held together by depersonalized commitments. In the politically nationalist and economically globalist setting, these contentless liturgies often take the form of two minutes of obligatory patriotism in which a member of the armed services appears during pauses in a sporting event for reverential applause before everyone gets back to the serious business of distracted consumption.

The show of superficial thanks for a military with which few have any direct connection leaves an afterglow that distracts from the harder question of whether the national military ultimately functions to secure the global market and so support the construction of abstracted, deracinated, and consumptive selves.

Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names.

a universal and homogenous market, resulting in a monoculture that, like its agricultural analogue, colonizes and destroys actual cultures rooted in experience, history, and place.

As the empire of liberty grows, the reality of liberty recedes.

One of liberalism’s main revolutions was not in the narrowly political realm but in its disassociation of nature from culture. The fundamental premise of liberalism is that the natural condition of man is defined above all by the absence of culture, and that, by contrast, the presence of culture marks existence of artifice and convention,

“Culture” is a word with deep connections to natural forms and processes, most obviously in words such as “agriculture” or “cultivate.” Just as the potential of a plant or animal isn’t possible without cultivation, so it was readily understood that the human creature’s best potential simply could not be realized without good culture. This was so evident to ancient thinkers that the first several chapters of Plato’s Republic are devoted not to a discussion of political forms but to the kinds of stories that are appropriate for children.

Aristotle declares that the first lawmaker is especially praiseworthy for inaugurating governance over “food and sex,” that is, the two elemental human desires that are most in need of cultivation and civilization: for food, the development of manners that encourage a moderate appetite and civilized consumption, and for sex, the cultivation of customs and habits of courtship, mannered interaction between the sexes, and finally marriage as the “container” of the otherwise combustible and fraught domain of sexuality. People who are “uncultivated” in the consumption of both food and sex, Aristotle observed, are the most vicious of creatures, literally consuming other humans to slake their base and untutored appetites. Far from being understood as opposites of human nature, customs and manners were understood to be derived from, governed by, and necessary to the realization of human nature.

culture. Culture is the “convention” by which humans interact responsibly with nature, at once conforming to its governance while introducing human ingenuity and invention within its limits and boundaries.

A healthy culture is akin to healthy agriculture—while clearly a form of human artifice, agriculture that takes into account local conditions (place) intends to maintain fecundity over generations (time), and so must work with the facts of given nature, not approach nature as an obstacle to the attainment of one’s unbound appetites.

Modern, industrialized agriculture works on the liberal model that apparent natural limits are to be overcome through short-term solutions whose consequences will be left for future generations. These solutions include the introduction of petroleum-based fertilizers that increase crop yields but contribute to hypoxic zones in lakes and oceans; genetically engineered crops that encourage increased use of herbicides and pesticides and whose genetic lines can’t be contained or predicted; the widespread use of plant mono-cultures that displace local varieties and local practices; and the use in cattle of antibiotics that have accelerated genetic mutations in bacteria and thus decreased these medicines’ usefulness for the human population. Industrial processes like these ignore the distinctive demands of local cul...

The effect is at once to liberate humans from acknowledgement of nature’s limits while rendering culture into wholly relativist belief and practice, untethered from anything universal or enduring.

A core feature of the liberal project is antipathy to culture as a deep relationship with a nature that defines and limits human nature.

Only with the ascendancy of liberal political orders does the experience of history in its fullest temporal dimension wane, and a pervasive presentism become a dominant feature of life. This condition is achieved especially through the dismantling of culture, the vessel of the human experience of time.

Like classical liberalism, progressivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the past, particularly tradition and custom. While widely understood to be future-oriented, it in fact rests on simultaneous assumptions that contemporary solutions must be liberated from past answers but that the future will have as much regard for our present as we have for the past. The future is an unknown country, and those who live in a present arrayed in hostility to the past must acquire indifference toward, and a simple faith in, a better if unknowable future. Those whose view of time is guided by such belief implicitly understand that their “achievements” are destined for the dustbin of history, given that the future will regard us as backward and necessarily superseded. Every generation must live for itself. Liberalism makes humanity into mayflies,

This transformation of the experience of time has been described in terms of two distinct forms of time: whereas preliberal humanity experienced time as cyclical, modernity thinks of it as linear. While suggestive and enlightening, this linear conception of time is still premised on a fundamental continuity between past, present, and future. Liberalism in its several guises in fact advances a conception of fractured time, of time fundamentally disconnected, and shapes humans to experience different times as if they were radically different countries.

Aristocracy, Tocqueville wrote, “links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link. . . . Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

fretted especially about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and hence to consider long-term implications of their actions and deeds as part of a long-term human community.

Once [liberal democrats] have grown accustomed not to think about what will happen after their life, they easily fall back into a complete and brutish indifference about the future, an attitude all too well suited to certain propensities in human nature. As soon as they have lost the way of relying chiefly upon distant hopes, they are naturally led to want to satisfy their least desires at once. . . . [Thus] there is always a danger that men will give way to ephemeral and casual desires and that, wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may never achieve anything great or calm or lasting.

the propensity to think only within the context of one’s own lifespan, and to focus on satisfaction of immediate and baser pleasures, is a basic “propensity in human nature.” To chasten, educate, and moderate this basic instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious, and familial structures, practices, and expectations.

cultural forms that tutor our presentism and instruct us that a distinctive feature of our humanity is our capacity to remember and to promise

A better way to understand culture is as a kind of collective trust. Culture is the practice of full temporality, an institution that connects the present to the past and the future. As the Greeks understood, the mother of culture—of the Nine Muses—was Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.” Culture educates us about our generational debts and obligations. At its best, it is a tangible inheritance of the past, one that each of us is obligated to regard with the responsibilities of trusteeship. It is itself an education in the full dimension of human temporality, meant to abridge our temptation to live within the present, with the attendant dispositions of ingratitude and irresponsibility that such a narrowing of temporality encourages. Preserved in discrete human inheritances—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.

the most fundamental right defining the liberal human is the right to leave the place of one’s birth.10 Our default condition is homelessness.

Community is more than a collection of self-interested individuals brought together to seek personal advancement. Rather, it “lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.”12

Properly conceived, community is the appropriate setting for flourishing human life—flourishing

This is because family life is premised, in Berry’s view, on the discipline of otherwise individualistic tendencies toward narrow self-fulfillment, particularly erotic ones. He commends arrangements [that] include marriage, family structure, divisions of work and authority, and responsibility for the instruction of children and young people. These arrangements exist, in part, to reduce the volatility and dangers of sex—to preserve its energy, its beauty, and its pleasure; to preserve and clarify its power to join not just husband and wife to one another but parents to children, families to the community, the community to nature; to ensure, so far as possible, that the inheritors of sexuality, as they come of age, will be worthy of it.13

Family is the wellspring of the cultural habits and practices that foster the wisdom, judgment, and local knowledge by which humans flourish and thrive in common and rightly claim the primary role in the education and upbringing of a given community’s children.

Modern liberalism, by contrast, insists on the priority of the largest unit over the smallest, and seeks everywhere to impose a homogenous standard on a world of particularity and diversity.

The tendency of modern politics—born of a philosophy that endorses the expansion of human control—is toward the subjection of all particularities to the logic of market dynamics, exploitation of local resources, and active hostility toward diverse local customs and traditions in the name of progress and rationalism.

our main political actors argue over whether the liberal state or the market better protects the liberal citizen, they cooperate in the evisceration of actual cultures.

If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everyone strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of legal frames.19

Solzhenitsyn cut to the heart of liberalism’s great failing and ultimate weakness: its incapacity to foster self-governance.

Elite universities, and the educational system more broadly, are the front lines in the advance of liberalism’s deliberate and wholesale disassembly of a broad swath of cultural norms and practices in the name of liberation from the past. Two areas in particular are served and undergirded by the educational imperative to advance the contemporary anticulture: dissolutions of sexual and economic norms, both advanced in the name of liberation of the human will that is defined especially by consumption, hedonism, and short-term thinking. The fact that each of liberalism’s two main parties—“liberals” and “conservatives”—views one of these activities as problematic and the other at the core of its commitments reflects the insidiousness and pervasiveness of liberalism’s advance.

Most institutions have gotten out of the business of seeking to educate the exercise of freedom through cultivation of character and virtue; emphasis is instead placed upon the likelihood of punishment after one body has harmed another body.

We tend to speak of such phenomena as “popular culture,” a market-tested and standardized product devised by commercial enterprises and meant for mass consumption. Whereas culture is an accumulation of local and historical experience and memory, liberal “culture” is the vacuum that remains when local experience has been eviscerated, memory is lost, and every place becomes every other place. A panoply of actual cultures is replaced by celebration of “multiculturalism,” the reduction of actual cultural variety to liberal homogeneity loosely dressed in easily discarded native garb.

The homogenous celebration of every culture effectively means no culture at all. The more insistent the invocation of “pluralism” or “diversity” or, in the retail world, “choice,” the more assuredly the destruction of actual cultures is advancing. Our primary allegiance is to celebration of liberal pluralism and diversity, shaping homogenized and identical adherents of difference, demanding and ensuring pervasive indifferentism.

while cultures are many and varied, their common features almost always include a belief in the continuity between human nature and the natural world; the experience of the past and the future as embedded within the present; and assurance of the sacredness of one’s place, along with depths of gratitude and responsibility to the care and preservation of one’s places.

the wholesale disregard for making places worth loving and living in for generations.

Turkle fears that we are losing not only that experience but also the capacity to form the thick bonds that constitute community, and that our attraction to social media at once undermines these bonds and provides a pale simulacrum to fill the void. Social media become ersatz substitutes for what they destroy, and Turkle seems pessimistic about the prospects for slowing this transformation.

Postman writes, “Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. . . . Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”