Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has “become more fully itself,” as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology.

To call for the cures of liberalism’s ills by applying more liberal measures is tantamount to throwing gas on a raging fire.

Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based on falsehood about human nature, and hence can’t help but fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain until the regime loses legitimacy.

The “limited government” of liberalism today would provoke jealousy and amazement from tyrants of old, who could only dream of such extensive capacities for surveillance and control of movement, finances, and even deeds and thoughts.

Liberalism claimed to replace arbitrary rule by distant and popularly unchosen leaders with responsive rule through elected public servants.

The wages of freedom are bondage to economic inevitability.

Advanced liberalism is eliminating liberal education with keen intent and ferocity, finding it impractical both ideologically and economically.

Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.

A better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance: practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the anticulture of liberalism.

redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity.

“The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama,

The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.

give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature.

Legitimacy is conferred by consent.

Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous.

Locke—the first philosopher of liberalism—on

Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not any particular conception of the “Good.”

Liberalism encourages loose connections.

insisted that man should employ natural science and a transformed economic system to seek mastery of nature.

First-wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives,” who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature.

Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies.

Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires.

Ironically, the more completely the sphere of autonomy is secured, the more comprehensive the state must become. Liberty, so defined, requires liberation from all forms of associations and relationships, from family to church, from schools to village and community, that exerted control over behavior through informal and habituated expectations and norms.

In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification:

Liberalism was thus a titanic wager that ancient norms of behavior could be lifted in the name of a new form of liberation and that conquering nature would supply the fuel to permit nearly infinite choices.

The project of advancing the liberal order takes the superficial form of a battle between seemingly intractable foes, and the energy and acrimony of that contest shrouds a deeper cooperation that ends up advancing liberalism as a whole.

Thus classical liberals claim that the individual is fundamental and, through an act of contract and consent, brings into existence a limited government. Progressive liberals claim that the individual is never wholly self-sufficient, and that we must instead understand ourselves to be more deeply defined by membership in a larger unit of humanity.

In distinct but related ways, the right and left cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism, although from different perspectives, using different means, and claiming different agendas.

In contrast to ancient theory—which understood liberty to be achieved only through virtuous self-government—modern theory defines liberty as the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites, while government is a conventional and unnatural limitation upon this pursuit.

its ideal of liberty can be realized only through a powerful state. If the expansion of freedom is secured

The Great Transformation.

Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom.

In The Quest for Community, his 1953 analysis of the rise of modern ideologies,

individualism is not the alternative to statism but its very cause.

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 presence of culture marks existence

Like classical liberalism, progressivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the past, particularly tradition and custom.

Liberalism makes humanity into mayflies, and unsurprisingly, its culmination has led each generation to accumulate scandalous levels of debt to be left for its children, while rapacious exploitation of resources continues in the progressive belief that future generations will devise a way to deal with the depletions.

Tocqueville believed, would have a powerful tendency to act only for the short term, thus to discount the consequences of their actions upon future generations:

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.

Culture is the practice of full temporality, an institution that connects the present to the past and the future.

Culture educates us about our generational debts and obligations.

Rather than produce our own cultures, grounded in local places, embedded in time, and usually developed from an inheritance from relatives, neighbors, and community—music, art, storytelling, food—we are more likely to consume prepackaged, market-tested, mass-marketed consumables, often branded in commercialized symbolism

Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual, and a major ambition and increasing achievement of liberalism was to reshape a world organized around the human war against nature, a pervasive amnesia about the past and indifference toward the future, and the wholesale disregard for making places worth loving and living in for generations.

The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how the internet is literally changing us, transforming our brains into different organs from those of the preinternet world.

Alone Together MIT’s Sherry Turkle assembles evidence that our pervasive use of modern social media doesn’t so much create new communities as it substitutes for the real-world communities that it destroys.

Neil Postman, whose book Technopoly—published in 1992—was suggestively subtitled The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

Francis Fukuyama in his famous essay, and later book, The End of History.

“Do Machines Make History?”

To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires,