Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

The Yale University Press series Politics and Culture begins with the premise that self-government, the hallmark and glory of the United States, the West, and an expanding number of countries around the world, is ailing.

The result is a bold and far-reaching critique of the root liberal assumption, associated with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, of individual autonomy.

This book was completed three weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Its main arguments matured over the past decade, before Brexit or President Trump was even conceivable. My basic assumption was that the underpinnings of our inherited civilized order—norms learned in families, in communities, through religion and a supporting culture—would inevitably erode under the influence of the liberal social and political state. But I anticipated that liberalism would relentlessly continue replacing traditional cultural norms and practices with statist Band-Aids, even as a growing crisis of legitimacy would force its proponents to impose liberal ideology upon an increasingly recalcitrant populace. Liberalism would thus simultaneously “prevail” and fail by becoming more nakedly itself.

Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance.

“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.”1 Only a politics grounded in the experience of a polis—lives shared with a sense of common purpose, with obligations and gratitude arising from sorrows, hopes, and joys lived in generational time, and with the cultivation of capacities of trust and faith—can begin to take the place of our era’s distrust, estrangement, hostility, and hatreds.

A political philosophy conceived some 500 years ago, and put into effect at the birth of the United States nearly 250 years later, was a wager that political society could be grounded on a different footing. It conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life. Opportunities for liberty were best afforded by a limited government devoted to “securing rights,” along with a free-market economic system that gave space for individual initiative and ambition. Political legitimacy was grounded on a shared belief in an originating “social contract” to which even newcomers could subscribe, ratified continuously by free and fair elections of responsive representatives. Limited but effective government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections were some of the hallmarks of this ascendant order and, by all evidence, wildly successful wager.

Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.

If indeed something more fundamental and transformative than “normal politics” is happening, then we are in the midst not just of a political realignment, characterized by the dying gasp of an old white working class and the lashing out of debt-burdened youth. We may rather be witnessing an increasingly systemic failure, due to the bankruptcy of its underlying political philosophy, of the political system we have largely taken for granted. The fabric of beliefs that gave rise to the nearly 250-year-old American constitutional experiment may be nearing an end. While a number of our Founding Fathers believed that they had lighted on a “new science of politics” that would resist the inevitable tendency of all regimes to decay and eventually die—even comparing the constitutional order to an entropy-defying perpetual motion device, “a machine that would go of itself”—we should rightly wonder whether America is not in the early days of its eternal life but rather approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations.

In contrast to its crueler competitor ideologies, liberalism is more insidious: as an ideology, it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties, diversions, and attractions of freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It makes itself invisible, much as a computer’s operating system goes largely unseen—until it crashes. Liberalism becomes daily more visible precisely because its deformations are becoming too obvious to ignore.

Among the few iron laws of politics, few seem more unbreakable than the ultimate unsustainability of ideology

More power accrues to the executive branch, which nominally controls the bureaucracy and through administrative rules can at least provide the appearance of responsiveness to a restive polity. Political rule by an increasingly unpopular legislature that theoretically derives its legitimacy from the people is replaced with commands and mandates of an executive whose office is achieved by massive influxes of lucre.

Marx once argued that the greatest source of economic discontent was not necessarily inequality but alienation—the separation of worker from product and the attendant loss of any connection with the goal and object of one’s efforts. Today’s economy not only maintains and extends this alienation but adds a profound new form of geographic alienation, the physical separation of beneficiaries of the globalized economy from those left behind.

We are meritocrats out of a survivalist instinct. If we do not race to the very top, the only remaining option is a bottomless pit of failure. To simply work hard and get decent grades doesn’t cut it anymore if you believe there are only two options: the very top or rock bottom. It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: to sit around for 2–3 hours at the dining hall “shooting the breeze,” or to spend time engaged in intellectual conversation in moral and philosophical issues, or to go on a date all detract from time we could be spending on getting to the top and, thus, will leave us worse off relative to everyone else. . . . Because we view humanity—and thus its institutions—as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security) to rely only upon ourselves.

The near unanimity of political views represented on college campuses is echoed by the omnipresent belief that an education must be economically practical, culminating in a high-paying job in a city populated by like-minded college graduates who will continue to reinforce their keen outrage over inequality while enjoying its bounteous fruits.

At the moment of liberalism’s culmination, then, we see the headlong evacuation of the liberal arts. The liberal arts were long understood to be the essential form of education for a free people, especially citizens who aspired to self-government. The emphasis on the great texts—which were great not only or even because they were old but because they contained hard-won lessons on how humans learn to be free, especially free from the tyranny of their insatiable desires—has been jettisoned in favor of what was once considered “servile education,” an education concerned exclusively with money making and a life of work, and hence reserved for those who did not enjoy the title of “citizen.”

Francis Bacon—who rejected classical arguments that learning aimed at the virtues of wisdom, prudence, and justice, arguing instead that “knowledge is power”—compared nature to a prisoner who, under torture, might be compelled to reveal her long-withheld secrets.

cf. virtue psychology

Even if we do not speak in these terms any more, the modern scientific project now dominates what we regard as useful and rewarding inquiry. Yet nature seems not to have surrendered. As the farmer and author Wendell Berry has written, if modern science and technology were conceived as a “war against nature,” then “it is a war in every sense—nature is fighting us as much as we are fighting it. And . . . it appears that we are losing.”

Our carbon-saturated world is the hangover of a 150-year party in which, until the very end, we believed we had achieved the dream of liberation from nature’s constraints.

The computer in every person’s pocket has been shown to change the structure of our minds, turning us into different creatures, conforming us to the demands and nature of a technology that is supposed to allow expression of our true selves.

For all the claims about electoral transformations—for “Hope and Change” or “Making America Great Again”—two facts are naggingly apparent: modern liberalism proceeds by making us both more individualist and more statist.

The most challenging step we must take is a rejection of the belief that the ailments of liberal society can be fixed by realizing liberalism. The only path to liberation from the inevitabilities and ungovernable forces that liberalism imposes is liberation from liberalism itself.

Liberalism has ruthlessly drawn down a reservoir of both material and moral resources that it cannot replenish. Its successes were always blank checks written against a future it trusted it could repair. Conservatism rightly observes that progressivism’s destination is a dead end, and progressivism rightly decries conservatism’s nostalgia for a time that cannot be restored. Conservatives and progressives alike have advanced liberalism’s project, and neither as constituted today can provide the new way forward that must be discerned outside our rutted path.

Moving beyond liberalism is not to discard some of liberalism’s main commitments—especially those deepest longings of the West, political liberty and human dignity—but to reject the false turn it made in its imposition of an ideological remaking of the world in the image of a false anthropology.

Out of the fostering of new and better selves, porously invested in the fate of other selves—through the cultivation of cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice, and small-scale democracy—a better practice might arise, and from it, ultimately, perhaps a better theory than the failing project of liberalism.

The foundational texts of the Western political tradition focused especially on the question how to constrain the impulse to and assertions of tyranny, and characteristically settled upon the cultivation of virtue and self-rule as the key correctives to the tyrannical temptation. The Greeks especially regarded self-government as a continuity from the individual to the polity, with the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered.

contesting claims that a significant break occurred between modernity and premodernity—specifically that a novel political philosophy arose in distinction to premodern forebears—has considerable warrant. Indeed, the very institutional and even semantic continuities between classical and Christian premodernity and the modern period that eventuates in the rise of liberalism can be deceptive. The achievement of liberalism was not simply a wholesale rejection of its precedents, but in many cases attained its ends by redefining shared words and concepts and, through that redefinition, colonizing existing institutions with fundamentally different anthropological assumptions. Liberty was fundamentally reconceived, even if the word was retained.

Classical and Christian political thought was self-admittedly more “art” than “science”: it relied extensively on the fortunate appearance of inspiring founding figures and statesmen who could uphold political and social self-reinforcing virtuous cycles, and acknowledged the likelihood of decay and corruption as an inevitable feature of any human institution.

Rather than promoting unrealistic standards for behavior—especially self-limitation—that could at best be unreliably achieved, Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed, and the quest for glory.

Second, the classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue and the cultivation of self-limitation and self-rule relied upon reinforcing norms and social structures arrayed extensively throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial life. What were viewed as the essential supports for a training in virtue—and hence, preconditions for liberty from tyranny—came to be viewed as sources of oppression, arbitrariness, and limitation.

A succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity. Liberalism’s ascent and triumph required sustained efforts to undermine the classical and Christian understanding of liberty, the disassembling of widespread norms, traditions, and practices, and perhaps above all the reconceptualization of primacy of the individual defined in isolation from arbitrary accidents of birth, with the state as the main protector of individual rights and liberty.

Fukuyama held that liberalism had proved itself the sole legitimate regime on the basis that it had withstood all challengers and defeated all competitors and further, that it worked because it accorded with human nature.

These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue.

Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.

Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.

Liberalism is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature. These two revolutions in the understanding of human nature and society constitute “liberalism” inasmuch as they introduce a radically new definition of “liberty.”

Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous. Liberalism begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes increasingly dependent on whether those relationships have been chosen, and chosen on the basis of their service to rational self-interest.

As Hobbes’s philosophical successor John Locke understood, voluntarist logic ultimately affects all relationships, including familial ones.

Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision, particularly once the child-rearing duties are completed. If this encompassing logic of choice applies to the most elemental family relationships, then it applies all the more to the looser ties that bind people to other institutions and associations,

This is not to suggest that a preliberal era dismissed the idea of individual free choice. Among other significant ways that preliberal Christianity contributed to an expansion of human choice was to transform the idea of marriage from an institution based upon familial and property considerations to a choice made by consenting individuals on the basis of sacramental love. What was new is that the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even personal relationships became dominated by considerations of individual choice based on the calculation of individual self-interest, and without broader consideration of the impact of one’s choices upon the community, one’s obligations to the created order, and ultimately to God.

Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not any particular conception of the “Good.” Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics claim merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors, but in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds.

Premodern political thought—particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature as part of a comprehensive natural order.

Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It displaced first the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and later the notion of human nature itself.

The first wave of this revolution—inaugurated by early-modern thinkers dating back to the Renaissance—insisted that man should employ natural science and a transformed economic system to seek mastery of nature. The second wave—developed largely by various historicist schools of thought, especially in the nineteenth century—replaced belief in the idea of a fixed human nature with belief in human “plasticity” and capacity for moral progress. These two iterations of liberalism—often labeled “conservative” and “progressive”—contend today for ascendance, but we do better to understand their deep interconnection.

Francis Bacon. Like Hobbes (who was Bacon’s secretary), he attacked the ancient Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of nature and natural law and argued for the human capacity to “master” or “control” nature—even reversing the effects of the Fall, including even the possibility of overcoming human mortality.

whoa

The second wave of this revolution begins as an explicit criticism of this view of humanity. Thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Marx, from Mill to Dewey, and from Richard Rorty to contemporary “transhumanists” reject the idea that human nature is fixed. They adopt the first-wave theorists’ idea that nature is subject to human conquest and apply it to human nature itself.

With humanity liberated from constitutive communities (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty expands seemingly without limit.

Liberalism thus culminates in two ontological points: the liberated individual and the controlling state.

In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification:

If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-contradictory and that it culminates in the twin depletions of moral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied, then we face a choice. We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice, or suffer by default an oscillation between growing anarchy and the increasingly forcible imposition of order by an increasingly desperate state.

The ancient claim that man is a political animal, and must through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost.