Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

It is fitting that Solzhenitsyn delivered this lecture at Harvard, the nation’s premier university, since the elite universities are preeminent examples of what were once institutions of cultural formation that have become purveyors of liberal anti-culture. Elite universities, and the educational system more broadly, are the front lines in the advance of liberalism’s deliberate and wholesale disassembly of a broad swath of cultural norms and practices in the name of liberation from the past. Two areas in particular are served and undergirded by the educational imperative to advance the contemporary anticulture: dissolutions of sexual and economic norms, both advanced in the name of liberation of the human will that is defined especially by consumption, hedonism, and short-term thinking. The fact that each of liberalism’s two main parties—“liberals” and “conservatives”—views one of these activities as problematic and the other at the core of its commitments reflects the insidiousness and pervasiveness of liberalism’s advance.