Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

“Liberty” is a word of ancient lineage, yet liberalism has a more recent pedigree, being arguably only a few hundred years old. It arises from a redefinition of the nature of liberty to mean almost the opposite of its original meaning. By ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance, whether achieved by the individual or by a political community. Because self-rule was achieved only with difficulty—requiring an extensive habituation in virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline over base but insistent appetites—the achievement of liberty required constraints upon individual choice.

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.

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.

Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based on falsehood about human nature, and hence can’t help but fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain until the regime loses legitimacy. Either it enforces conformity to a lie it struggles to defend, or it collapses when the gap between claim and reality finally results in wholesale loss of belief among the populace. More often than not, one precedes the other.