Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

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 “-ism” of “multiculturalism” signals liberalism’s victorious rout of actual cultural variety. Even as cultures are replaced by a pervasive anticulture, the language of culture is advanced as a means of rendering liberal humanity’s detachment from specific cultures. 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.