I’ve talked a lot about the right and Groyperization, but in the more intellectual realm we’ve witnessed the rise of a group of thinkers who are referred to as postliberals. One way to understand them is that when the Trump cult, conspiracy theorists, and the world of streamers have hollowed out intellectual life on the right, they have been there to fill the void.
To me, these people are just as much of a disturbing sign of the intellectual decline of conservatism as conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. They are characterized by an anti-empirical style. The postliberal thinker doesn’t engage in the world of facts or the details of policy. He has a story to tell, and relies on emotion to appeal to readers inclined towards a kind of pessimistic neuroticism.
Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame is perhaps the best known of the postliberal philosophers. My first real engagement with his work was listening to him on The Ezra Klein Show. The entire conversation basically went something like this.
Ezra Klein: Welcome, Patrick, I’m glad to have you on to talk about postliberalism. Can you tell me about this philosophy?
Patrick Deneen: Well, I believe in the Common Good. Elites and old guard conservatives believe in individualism. This has destroyed communities and broken the bonds that hold us together. We need to get away from such ideas and back towards a more communal approach.
Ezra Klein: Well, that’s interesting. Joe Biden just signed The Helping Families Act that provided a tax benefit to families with children. Is that something you would support?
Patrick Deneen: Well, I’m not much of a policy guy. I just believe in the Common Good.
Ezra Klein: So what kind of policies would you support?
Patrick Deneen: I told you, I’m not a policy guy. I just believe in the Common Good. We need more Goodness. We need to think about how the Goodness is something we have in Common. Nations matter, the problem is cosmopolitan elites who have sneered at the working class and the concept of family.
Ezra Klein: Liberals don’t like families? Barack Obama has a family, he talks about it a lot.
Patrick Deneen: Yes, well, I read a law review article that called for the abolition of the family.
Ezra Klein: Hmm…Ok, well you’re not a policy wonk. Let me try this. I gather you're some kind of social conservative. So would your vision involve making it harder to get divorced?
Patrick Deneen: Slow down with all the facts and figures man! I haven’t gotten into the weeds like that. What’s important is to realize that human beings need connections with one another, we are not atomized individuals.
Ezra Klein: But policy is where our values are translated into real world impact. How do I differentiate your views from Obama or Biden’s budget proposal?
Patrick Deneen: I appreciate that, but it’s not my area of expertise. I talk about values. Before I get to the budget, I need to know where your values are.
I’m not exaggerating by much. Listen for yourself.
Deneen is clearly economically liberal and socially conservative. For some reason, he doesn’t want to spell out his actual positions. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to look at the federal budget and say we spend too little on families, or to do enough research to come to the conclusion that no-fault divorce has been bad for society. This isn’t learning quantum mechanics. Why won’t he just say what he believes?
I heard from someone who has been involved with setting up campus debates that Deneen is known for making it a condition that there be no discussion of public policy. I don’t know if this was in response to the disastrous appearance on Ezra Klein, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. I think his lack of engagement with policy questions, and the fact that Deneen has emerged as a leading philosopher of postliberalism, tells you something important about the movement and its ways of engaging with ideas.
You can just say “I’m socially conservative and economically liberal.” But social conservatism might offend people like Klein, and to be economically liberal may open the door to someone who knows a bit of economics challenging your views. Klein calls Deneen out on the two-step, where he makes grand, sweeping claims about the failures of elites, professes adherence to vague things that sound good like “family” and “community,” and keeps the discussion at such an abstract level that no one can ever really disagree with him. Deneen’s politics seem to be basically Joe Biden on economics plus eliminating Critical Race Theory and restricting immigration, abortion, and gay marriage. But being a socially conservative Biden doesn’t justify one’s status as an intellectual doing something new and important. And if your policies aren’t that radical, the question becomes what are you so angry about?
The phrase “common good conservatism” takes this avoidance of concrete reality to its logical conclusion. To say you are a libertarian means you believe markets are a better way of organizing society than central planning or large scale redistribution. A socialist believes the opposite. Social conservatism and liberalism are also easy to pin down. What does it mean to say that you believe in the common good? As opposed to thinkers who advocate the bad? Are they under the impression that free market economists and social liberals think that their views make society worse off but just don’t care?
I began reading Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future to see if my impression was correct, and yes, it was basically the Klein interview but without anyone to push back on him.
The book doesn’t have what I would consider arguments. It simply makes unfounded assertions that pile on top of one another. Deneen doesn’t engage with ideas, debate, or inform. He paints a picture with a predetermined narrative saying that elites have failed, the working class and regular people have been wronged, and we need a new political movement to make things better. Deneen never asks questions like whether things are as bad as he says, whether economic leftism will actually make people better off, or how much it makes sense to have a political movement based on adherence to a set of abstract values that almost everyone would say they agree with.
See how Deneen ends Chapter 1:
While both classes are responsible for this cycle, the ruling class bears the most responsibility, having the most resources. Unfortunately, the current ruling class is uniquely ill equipped for reform, having become one of the worst of its kind produced in history, as the next chapter will show.
Huge if true! One of the worst elites in human history! You probably won’t be surprised to learn that he did not actually show this in the next chapter. He just started making more fact-free assertions. Like this one:
The result is the rise of a visible new form of tyranny, apparently paradoxical: an illiberal liberalism that demands and is willing to exert power without any internal limit.
Are there no internal limits to modern liberalism? How was Deneen able to publish his book? How was he able to get on Ezra Klein’s show to provide such dangerous insights like families are important and government should defend the common good? How oppressed are conservatives by historical standards? Maybe find out by taking a broader perspective and making analogies to past societies?
A vast testing and assessment regime exists to identify managerial talent in every location around the globe, extract the human raw material from whatever arbitrary location it happened to be born and raised, refine that material in elite educational institutions, and insert it into the global economy in key urban hubs that become magnets for the refined product. As the experience with COVID-19 revealed, this work can be done nearly anywhere, and often through a screen and wireless access, making the connection to any particular place tenuous and revisable. While those deemed “essential workers” increasingly resemble a class of serfs, [emphasis added] the liberal aristocrats reside above and beyond the plague, often supportive of economic shutdowns and closures that leave them largely unaffected.
How exactly does the American working class resemble a class of serfs? Here you might be saying that this is obviously hyperbole. Ok, but what is the point? If they’re increasingly moving in the direction of serfdom, surely you should be able to at least point to ways in which their lives are getting worse. Are working class Americans who are free to take or leave gig work jobs as they please more like serfs than those whose entire livelihoods were tied to a singular factory? You might need a chart or graph to show that. Perhaps a survey. Give me literally anything that resembles a real argument. Instead we just get victim porn focused on the supposed oppression of the American working class.
One more:
The weakening of the family, neighborhood, church and religious community, and other associations has resulted in the degradation of the social and economic conditions of “the many,” even as “the few” have garnered a monopoly both on economic and social advantages.
Have “the many” really been “degraded” in their economic conditions? Sometimes leftists present bad data and come to similar conclusions, but at least they’re making a real effort. You can point out what’s wrong with their charts, as free market thinkers have done with the one purporting to show a divergence between productivity and wages, which, among other problems, doesn’t include benefits like health care and social security. One can argue with the leftist who uses statistics incorrectly. Deneen is engaging in a completely different kind of enterprise. There is nothing here to refute.
I’m not saying everyone needs to be a policy wonk who goes deep into the weeds of topics like the federal budget and the tax code. But if you make claims like the working class is suffering from economic distress, you need to be able to prove it. If you want to make an argument that contemporary elites are particularly bad by historical standards, there needs to be some consideration of the contrary position. It’s fine to not want to bother learning anything about economics or public policy, but in that case do not hold yourself up as a person who is in a position to comment on these topics. Deneen can debate the meaning of public virtue or whatever it is that political philosophers like him do. What he shouldn’t be able to do is pontificate about trade or the living standards of Americans and use phrases like common good, community, and family to cover up for him not knowing what he’s talking about.
Each of the quotes above is from the first two chapters. I couldn’t take any more of the book, so perhaps Deneen showed his ability to argue by using logic and facts in later chapters, though I doubt it.
This isn’t a matter of me disagreeing with postliberals because they’re economically leftist and socially conservative. Someone like Noah Smith is more left-wing on economics than I am, while Ben Shapiro is much more conservative on social issues. I can clearly understand what they are saying and grapple with their reasoning – whether it is based on empirical data, clearly defined principles, or some combination of the two.
The postliberal is something else. He’s not defined by his ideology as conventionally understood. Rather, I think of postliberalism as a style and collection of postures: contemptuous towards elites, anti-individualistic, unempirical, and deeply pessimistic about the modern world. Whether a conservative will cite a paper that uses math or clearly spell out his premises and define his terms in making an argument is a better indicator of whether he is a postliberal than his position on abortion or gay marriage. Lyman Stone, for example, is very right-wing on life issues, and I disagree with him on a lot, but he’s a data guy, and therefore doesn’t get classified as a postliberal or fit in with their circles. I see the American Compass project as an attempt to provide the empirical backing for postliberal instincts on trade and immigration, but their work is quite awful, which is why it doesn’t get much engagement or support from mainstream economists.
We can make an analogy here to postmodernism on the left. The way to understand this group of philosophers isn’t as people who are just more extreme in their politics than the typical Democratic voter. Maybe they are, but that’s not their distinguishing feature, as most socialists and communists have no interest in grappling with dense philosophical texts. Rather, we know the postmodernists as people who have a certain communication style, which involves obfuscation and repeating a few buzzwords in the service of telling a story about the world. Deneen isn’t as unreadable as Judith Butler, but he matches her in his work consisting of a recurring series of radical postures taken against a hated enemy, along with a hostility to the empirical testing of claims and grappling with practical politics.
Postliberalism does not just involve the spread of bad ideas. Its rise negates the ability to have a culture where individuals have real debates about philosophy, economics, or public policy issues. The appeal of this worldview I think lies not in an objective reaction to the failures of elites, as people like Deneen would contend, but in younger generations becoming overly pessimistic on account of spending too much time online and educational sorting making the right dumber and less informed. It’s much easier to read a series of articles making the same argument over and over again that elites are bad and the working class is oppressed than to learn a bit of economic theory and math, or even define your terms and proceed in a straightforward manner toward a conclusion. The respected intellectuals on the new right are simply the more highbrow equivalents of the figures we have seen take over conservative media.
I read Why Liberalism Failed because I was interested in what high-brow Trumpism would sound like. I think the most measured thing I could say about the book is that Deneen clearly thinks of himself as a political *philosopher* and very much not a political economist or policy thinker, as Richard notes.
A less measured take would be that it was some of the most incoherent ivory tower babble I’ve ever drudged through. I came away thinking less of the movement to develop an intellectually sound Trumpism that could survive the end of his personality cult. Just as in the book Richard discusses, it is completely devoid of any factual grounding. And his interview with Klein was a disaster in the same vein.
At the end of the day someone who fancies themself a societal diagnostician but who views actual practical treatment recommendations as something beneath them… well, that’s a radical, I suppose. They don’t want power, they want to endlessly critique power, etc.
Patrick Deneen is basically a less nuanced, less intelligent, more populist, more partisan Alastair MacIntyre. I have a lot of respect for MacIntyre and other communitarians like Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel and agree with a lot of their positions. Which is why it’s genuinely sad for me to see what the “postliberals” have done with their legacy, which is basically use it as a paper-thin cover for MAGA-ism. But MAGA is not really socially conservative and economically left wing so much as it is socially nihilistic and economically schizophrenic. It is not clear how it is supposed to be markedly more pro-family or pro-community (which are good things!) than the “liberalism” it condemns. That leaves postliberalism as less a set of principles than just conservatism minus any principles like rule of law, democracy or free markets that might get in the way of a corrupt, authoritarian kakistocracy. To the extent he ever had any credibility, Patrick Deneen and his ilk sold it for thirty pieces of silver long ago.