Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Evidence of our anticulture surrounds us yet is pervasively denied. Liberalism extends itself by inhabiting spaces abandoned by local cultures and traditions, leading either to their discarding or suppression or, far more often, to their contentless redefinition. 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 that masks that culture’s evisceration. A stream of stories accentuates our increasing inability to do things for ourselves, from Matthew Crawford’s widely read and discussed account of the decline of shop class as an indicator of our widening ignorance of how to make and repair things to a recent report of declining sales and maintenance of pianos in the home, a consequence of the replacement of music played at home with mass-produced music.23