How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

by Ben Shapiro

Many on the Right argue that reliance on bigger government isn’t a choice, but a necessity. The “common good” requires it. They argue that the failure of social institutions hasn’t been a by-product of governmental intervention, but a by-product of liberalism itself. Individual rights, in this view, fail to account for humanity’s need for community properly, and thus for communal standards—individual rights turn us into atomized fragments, destined to conflict with one another. Individual rights are inherently relativistic, recognizing as they do different and competing versions of “the good.” Patrick Deneen, the author of Why Liberalism Failed, makes this argument most eloquently. According to Deneen, the American founders erred in “not foreseeing that their atomistic philosophy would act as a solvent on our civic institutions”; he also casts heavy aspersions at capitalism, stating, “The economic system that simultaneously is both liberalism’s handmaiden and also its engine, like a Frankenstein monster, takes on a life of its own, and its processes and logic can no longer be controlled by people purportedly enjoying the greatest freedom in history.”76 Deneen argues that liberty-oriented individualists ended up making common cause with leftist thinkers pushing against traditional social mores—and that’s how we ended up with an allegedly heartless capitalism alongside a sexual politics focused chiefly on individual choice rather than on responsible standards.