Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

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.”1 The only forms of shared cultural “liturgy” that remain are celebrations of the liberal state and the liberal market. National holidays have become occasions for shopping, and shopping holy days such as “Black Friday” have become national holidays.

Anticulture