What’s curious about the books in this God-minded tradition—the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen has recently produced an impassioned and influential one called, bluntly, Why Liberalism Failed—is that, though they’re always written ostensibly in response to a very specific circumstance (the dire spiritual condition of France in 1905, the moral crisis of America in 2018), they always say exactly the same things and propose exactly the same cure. Chesterton was an inspired aphorist, while Deneen writes in a version of American academese. But one could wholly subsume one critique
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