Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

The same dynamic is seen in the economic realm: fulfilling the sovereignty of individual choice in an economy requires the demolition of any artificial boundaries to a marketplace. The market—once a defined and limited space within the city—must ultimately become borderless. The logic of liberalism thus demands near-limitless expansion of the state and the market. A massive state architecture and a globalized economy, both created in the name of the liberation of the individual, combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures that were called into being in the name of her freedom. Current electoral discontents within liberal democracies are directed both against titanic economic forces and against distant and ungovernable state structures. Contemporary liberals condemn such “populist” responses, but they are a reaction to the ungovernability of both the economic and political domains and represent a bottom-up effort to reassert political control over an increasingly administrative state and a denationalized economy. While liberals are quick to condemn such populism as “antidemocratic,” in fact, for all its evident problems—including its easy manipulation by demagogues—the contemporaneous effort to assert popular control over both centralized state structures and the global market signals a reinvigorated democratic impulse that worries liberals precisely because it is driven by the demos.