Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Liberty, as defined by the originators of modern liberalism, was the condition in which humans were completely free to pursue whatever they desired.

“Loneliness is one of the first things that Americans spend their money achieving. . . . We are lonely because we want to be lonely.

Liberal education is replaced with servile education.

Liberalism further undermines education by replacing a definition of liberty as an education in self-government with liberty as autonomy and the absence of constraint.

“A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.”

To be free—liberal—was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education.

This change of emphasis is to be found in the updated mission statement of nearly every university in America.

Amid their freedom, students increasingly feel that they have no choice but to pursue the most practical major, eschewing subjects to which native curiosity might attract them in obeisance to the demands of the market.

Professors in the humanities showed their worth by destroying the thing they studied.

Why accept any of the facts of biology when those “facts” could be altered, when identity itself is a matter of choice?

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida disdain the liberal arts for not leading to high-paying jobs—and find unexpected support from President Obama, who criticized art history on the same grounds.

Such liberation from all obstacles is finally illusory, for two simple reasons: human appetite is insatiable and the world is limited.

was the result of the idea that one could consume without limits, that a new kind of economics, combined with a liberatory politics, now allowed us to live beyond our means. The

After all, it was the leading graduates of the elite institutions of the nation who occupied places of esteem in top financial and political institutions throughout the land who were responsible for precipitating the economic crisis. Graduates

Elite universities engage in the educational equivalent of strip mining: identifying economically viable raw materials in every city, town, and hamlet, they strip off that valuable commodity, process it in a distant location, and render the products economically useful for productivity elsewhere.

Liberalism’s success thus fosters the conditions of its failure: having claimed to bring about the downfall of aristocratic rule of the strong over the weak, it culminates in a new, more powerful, even more permanent aristocracy that fights ceaselessly to maintain the structures of liberal injustice.

Locke offers the Indians in the Americas as an example of such a “pre-history”: subsistence societies in which neither “industriousness and rationality” nor “querulousness and contentiousness” can become salient.

Nothing rational about creating a fecund ecoksystem

In such a world, a potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is so busy hunting or fishing for each day’s meal that his potential goes wholly unrealized.

Jobs and Gates would not have time to steal

This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility. Today’s classical liberals continue

Locke’s thesis was that ongoing and continuous growth of wealth and prosperity could function as a replacement for social cohesion and solidarity.

“The spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper. . . . When they are not on their guard, [the democratists] treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of their power.”

Society today has been organized around the Millian principle that “everything is allowed,” at least so long as it does not result in measurable (mainly physical) harm.

In effect, liberalism advances most effectively through both classical and progressive liberalisms, the economic liberalism of Locke and the lifestyle liberalism of Mill, even while the two claim to be locked in battle.

A degraded form of citizenship arises from liberalism’s relentless emphasis upon private over public things, self-interest over civic spirit, and aggregation of individual opinion over common good.

The genius of liberalism was to claim legitimacy on the basis of consent and arrange periodic managed elections, while instituting structures that would dissipate democratic energies, encourage the creation of a fractured and fragmented public, and ensure government by select elite actors.

Instead, the true genius of liberalism was subtly but persistently to shape and educate the citizenry to equate “democracy” with the ideal of self-made and self-making individuals—expressive individualism—while accepting the patina of political democracy shrouding a powerful and distant government whose deeper legitimacy arises from enlarging the opportunities and experience of expressive individualism.

Against Democracy

voters are consistently ill-informed and even ignorant, and that democratic government thus will ultimately reflect the deficiencies of the electorate.

The Crisis of Democratic Theory, Edward A. Purcell masterfully documented the crisis of democratic theory that occurred as a result of early findings in the social sciences.

Want to read

Accompanying calls for more democracy were concomitant calls for less popular influence over policy making.

Armed with objective data from the social scientists, a credentialed, bureaucratic elite was expected to take cues from, and at times to lead and direct, irrational and ignorant democratic masses to accept objectively good public policy.

The persistent absence of civic literacy, voting, and public spiritedness is not an accidental ill that liberalism can cure; it is the outcome of liberalism’s unparalleled success.

Madison hoped one consequence of enlarging the orbit would be heightened levels of mutual distrust among a citizenry inclined to advance particular interests, rendering them less likely to combine and communicate:

The resulting liberal polity thus fosters a liberal society—one that commends self-interest, the unleashed ambition of individuals, an emphasis on private pursuits over a concern for public weal, and an acquired ability to maintain psychic distance from any other human, including to reconsider any relationships that constitute a fundamental limitation on our personal liberty.

The only common allegiance that would remain was to a political project that supported ever more individuation, fragmentation, and expansion of “diversity of faculties.”

seeing politics as the means of mastering nature, expanding national power, and liberating the individual from interpersonal bonds and obligations, including those entailed by active democratic citizenship.

Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science: they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it.”

Tocqueville would have regarded a citizenry that was oblivious to local self-governance, but which instead directed all its attention and energy to the machinations of a distant national power, not as the culmination of democracy but as its betrayal.

Democracy, in his view, was defined not by rights to voting either exercised or eschewed but by the ongoing discussion and disputation and practices of self-rule in particular places with familiar people over a long period of time.

LIBERALISM has failed because liberalism has succeeded.

thralldom.

We have endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options over whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening boredom within them.

Yet the main practical achievement of this liberation of women has been to move many of them into the workforce of market capitalism,

All but forgotten are arguments, such as those made in the early Republic, that liberty consists of independence from the arbitrariness not only of a king but of an employer.

homesteaders and “radical homemakers” who—like their religious counterparts—are seeking within households and local communities and marketplaces to rediscover old practices, and create new ones, that foster new forms of culture that liberalism otherwise seeks to eviscerate.

The greatest benefit of civic participation, he argued, was not its effects in the world, but those on the relations among people engaged in civic life: “Citizens who are bound to take part in public affairs must turn from the private interests and occasionally take a look at something other than themselves.

What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life. Not a better theory, but better practices.