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.
I really like some of Charles Taylor's work (e.g., the Hegel book), but his "communitarianism" is nearly as undercooked as Deneen in my opinion. For some reason these political philosophers never felt/feel the need to say, "And here is the exact country/polity which comes closest to my ideal, and here is why"--which would go a long way towards solving the problem. In other words, Taylor’s communitarianism provides almost no concrete institutional or economic model. It leaves key questions (for me at least) about corporations, scale, and immigration under-theorized/unengaged.
Sandel, on the other hand, drives me nuts. He is perhaps most prestigious figure to oppose kidney markets, and his arguments are terrible.
I think the thing with most of the communitarians (asides from Macintyre) is that in terms of policy they're basically just garden variety liberals. If you asked Taylor he would probably admit this while arguing that his model is more consonant with the liberal welfare state system than Rawlsianism actually is.
I think this points to the basic problem of religion in government, which is the assumption that if we all convert to say Catholicism or Mormonism, then all our problems will solve themselves.
As someone from an Evangelical background from the South, I have known a ton of very devout people with all kinds of personal problems - broken marriages, addictions, violence, sexual abuse (perpetrator and victim), suicide, being generally unemployable, etc. Being Christian did not solve their problems - as Evangelicals often say: "We're not perfect, just forgiven."
Solving social and economic problems requires well-thought out solutions. These solutions can sometimes be relgious or partially religious in nature, but they still need to be well-thought out. I recall Christ himself saying something in the Gospels about a king with an army of 10,000 facing an army of 20,000 - do the freaking math!
"I think this points to the basic problem of religion in government, which is the assumption that if we all convert to say Catholicism or Mormonism, then all our problems will solve themselves."
No serious thinker argues for this position.
The closest I can recall is the Solzhenitsyn quote:
"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’ ... If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened."
But Solzhenitsyn basically meant that without God, political catastrophes become possible; with God, they are less likely (human evil, error, and tragedy still persist though).
I don't see how any of this points to the "basic problem" of religion in government. Can you explain further?
I'm referring to Deneen's call for Trad/Religion to save us from the evils of Liberalism and its pesky individual rights. That is what he is calling for even if he pretends not to do so.
It's an attempt to intellectualize MAGA, but really, up to this point, MAGA has been nothing but a cult around the orange guy. And what does the orange guy once in power? Boomercon tax cuts, plus some random tariffs which he renegs on every three days or so. What's there to intellectualize?
As I understand Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (without um, having read it) he is advancing the idea that the atomistic value-free liberalism of today, utterly unmoored from human nature and morality, is simply the liberalism of Madison and Jefferson plus time.
No! The American Founders and Framers spoke of nature and nature’s God, they put the strongest emphasis on society’s need for virtue and religion in their new Republic, our rights are only “unalienable” because they’re endowed by our Creator
Yeah, I kind of liked Why Liberalism Failed (his prior book) at the time it came out, as someone who is potentially sympathetic to his ideas. It seemed to be setting up a philosophical diagnosis for "what's wrong with the world," which would be expanded upon further in time, alongside more detailed remedies for the disease. I was curious how he would follow it up.
When he finally did get around to following it up with Regime Change, I only made it about as far as Richard did. It wasn't good. By failing to build upon the earlier book, which very much needed building upon, his whole project appears rather empty.
“Postliberalism” comprises non-liberal secular conservatives, various kinds of Protestants, Orthodox like Rod Dreher, and plenty of nihilistic trolls as well as Catholic conservatives from hardcore integralists like Adrian Vermeule to the much softer Ed Feser. The Catholics have probably the most detailed positive vision of any of these groups, some of whom are really just negative radicals, but certainly not everyone follows them.
Hanania writes “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.”
First of all, any market economy that includes big firms will end up doing a lot of central planning to manage the intra-company economy. Second a market-based economy consisting of a mixture of employee-owned and operated corporations, family businesses, municipal-owned utilities, and mutual companies, with no government planning besides what we currently do, would count as socialist.
A government run economy is not socialist at all, its state capitalism, what is usually practiced by communists. Actual communism exists only at the small scale, mostly in monasteries.
It’s pretty easy why Deneen won’t come out with concrete policy proposals: he’s hiding his power level. He knows that proposing some catholic integralist government/theocracy would get him rightly driven out of polite society. So he’s stuck trying to criticize liberalism while not overtly providing an alternative. These integralist vermin really need a Cristero war if they push their policies to put them back in their place.
The sad thing about American Catholic Radicals is that they have zero percent chance of ever imposing their religion on the US. The US is a Protestant nation. Unlike Europe we have always been majority Protestant, and even our Post-Christian liberals' ideas are based on Protestant late 1800's Progressivism. Catholicism has always been loathed and mistrusted by a majority of Americans, who would sooner convert to Islam than be Catholic. Not saying this is right or wrong, just that it is.
To me all of this points back to my own "peak liberalism" theory that liberalism has essentially run out of steam after hundreds of years of making sweeping changes to Western Civilization.
And now that liberalism has reached the end of what it can offer to humanity (at least for the time being), the liberal vanguard has been despretely seeking for new dragons to slay, dredging the swamps of marxist, racial, and gender theories to give us a completely new religion that is unfortunately unpalatable to most people (aka "wokeness"), as well as highly corrosive to the bonds of society itself.
Conservatives, who are essentially just liberals who believe in whatever liberals believed in 20-30 years ago, now have no one left to copy, and thus have lost all their bearings on what the future may hold, which leaves them even more vulnerable to demagogues and cultural pandering as well as more likely to turn to an authoritarian leader who will promise them anything.
Bascially, Americans are for the most part doing materially well, but are "spiritually" sick. Most of us have no idea where we are going or what we are doing. Technology is simply changing too fast and culture is changing fast along with it.
I must admit I don't know what the answer is. But I do know that the answer will very likely not come from conservatives because they've never had an idea that a liberal didn't have first. Liberals might be able to right the ship, but first they will have to decisively defeat the socially corrosive "woke" movement that hobbles them. The abundance movement is a step in the right direction, but it lacks the cultural fervor needed.
It's possible some new leader or philosophy will arrive and turn things around, but also possible that things might not turn around. It's both distressing and sad to think that the peak human civilization to date will just give up and die because everyone got bored and stopped caring.
Patrick Deneen is not a liberal from 20 years ago or even 50 years ago type conservative. He rejects nearly all core tenets of classical and progressive liberalism which make it impossible to categorize him in the American political system as either a conservative in the Republican sense or a liberal in the Democratic sense.
Where did you get the idea that Deneen can be dismissed as an uncreative conservative who is essentially a "liberal ... [from] 20-30 years ago" that has nothing to offer to the conversation?
And how does the abundance movement go into the right direction? To my knowledge, it is merely liberalism but this time we flood society with affordable goods in order to maintain politico-economic stability and obfuscate the spiritual void liberalism itself has created. Regarding your point that the abundance movement lacks cultural fervor, it is precisely because of its materialism that it lacks said fervor.
Do you really think that this is a move into the right direction to construct a post-liberal world, which is after your argumentation an inevitability if liberalism has exhausted its potential?
Post-liberalism is still liberalism. Just like postfeminism is still feminism. Postmodernism is still modernism.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Like all right-wing figures, Deneen is a fake and a grifter. How can he not be? He has to make ends, and "trad" living does not pay for itself. Right-wingers want a past that never was. You can't recreate that. Hence zero specifics and lots of wishing.
This is exactly what Post-Liberalism is about. The Post Liberalism that Deneen promotes is accepting precisely that the genie cannot be put back into the bottle.
Deneen acknowledges the accomplishments of liberalism/modernity and argues that we have to find a way to grapple with the socially destructive tendencies of liberalism or else society will cease to exist, at least in any form that resembles a society that places humans at its center. He is not your typical reactionary, he actually offers something new to the discourse.
And I think it is quite dishonest to criticize Deneen for being vague or unempirical when reading his works because they are written in the category of political philosophy not social critique or policy proposals.
When you actually engage with his ideas and not discard him the second you find something remotely critical, you may find something very valuable.
When you are interested in finding out more, I can recommend his UNE Center for Global Humanities talk and if you want to find out more about Deneen's empirical sources you can look into Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam or Murray's Falling Apart. Even though Deneen disagrees with their conclusions, the graphs and data they provide largely support what Deneen is claiming.
I agree with your take on Deneen, though it is interesting that Obama took such a high view of Deneen’s first (I think) book, which trafficked in some of the same vague pronouncements. Maybe Obama just wanted to be seen as engaging with (what was then) counterintuitive and obscure takes.
I'm not saying the book is *good*, but it seems like Deneen's criticism is a lot like the other criticisms of markets that have come out recently. Specifically:
The *relative status* of the working class in the US has gone down greatly. I remember reading a statistic something like "In 1950, white males with a high school diploma had a median income higher than the median income of employed Americans". As late as 1970, working in a steel mill paid as well as being a professor. But due to a number of shifts in the economy, the number of working-class people (income comes from wages, not driven by education or rare skills) whose income is over the median has gone down drastically.
So the complaint is "We are part of the community and you cannot leave us behind!" You can smell this in a lot of these complaints: "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." That is, the smart kids become bankers, but they're not bankers in the towns they grew up in and can't be tapped to pay for all sorts of things in those towns.
But it's difficult to state this clearly because what they want is redistribution (of money and status) from the professional class (not the one percent) to the working class, and it's hard to get a book tour if you say that out loud. It's also hard to fix -- All traditional forms of redistribution benefit the poor as much or more, and the working class is desperate to increase its separation from the poor. (Hence the recent fixation on "work requirements" for social benefits.)
What they want is a leveling of the wage distribution, which seems to be getting the term "predistribution". But that's hard to do except in a mid-20th-century economy, where the bulk of the money moved through a small number of huge, mass employers that were unionized.
I have never read Deneen, but I wouldn't discount postliberalism just because his work is vague and unempirical. Postliberalism is a specific strain of communitarianism, which is itself a highly intellectually rigorous school of political philosophy that dates back to Aristotle. Deneen might make weak arguments and unfounded assumptions; I am not personally familiar enough with his work to say. However, other communitarians have made persuasive and well-founded critiques of liberalism that were previously neglected in American politics. The liberal vs. communitarian dynamic also predates and transcends the left-right spectrum.
From the left, Michael Sandel argued very persuasively that Rawls' theory of justice is wrong by viewing people as atomistic entities that are divorced from the society in which they exist. From the right, Robert Putnam and Roger Scruton were both communitarians who made serious arguments about how modern liberalism has promoted individualism to the point of eroding social bonds and communal associations necessary for a liberal democracy to exist in the first place. Families and communities are weaker and less bound together than in the past. Religious and civic participation are both declining simultaneously. There is a solid but disorganized foundation of evidence to support the basic tenets of postliberalism. There is definitely a way those arguments could be incorporated into a convincing framework, even if Deneen or other writers like Harzony haven't done so.
Everyone loves to be 'oppressed'. That's what Pop-Politics has become. You get up on stage and scream in anger over how The System has ravaged your [insert ethnic/economic/religious denomination/sexual preference here] leaving it in smoking ruins of ash and post-industrial mayonnaise.
We're all lonely suffering victims who need to unite, because together we are strong and can get the Good Things. Like Majestic Mountains, kids riding bikes to the park in the summer, BBQs on the front porch with grandma in her rocker.
And fight the evil people who want the Bad Things like decay and filth.
It's comical, but look at the MAGA ads for ICE. They really has become this sort of idiotic vibe that has no real answers short of emotionally throwing temper tantrums.
I don't know exactly what defines 'post-liberals', if it is as Hanania says, 'socially conservative, economically liberal'. Something about that seems off. They clearly have values they wish to pursue, same as the Left. Which I think is a better comparison. They're essentially a 'National Conservative' group, only because National Socialism was already taken.
I think this is where the whole Left-Right thing breaks down and it's more helpful to simply label them both branches of Collectivism. Ben Shapiro is closer on the scale away from them towards an individualist government, and my preferred spectrum would have a principled stand by government for individual rights, completely seperated from religion, such as Ayn Rand would advocate, before Libertarian-Anarchists at the other endpoint of the spectrum (I'd agree with her that anarchism is an unmitigated evil).
When you back up and view it on this scale, Deneen is just another of the sorry attempts to rationalize what doesn't make any sense and join a clique. That's what all the fuzziness is about. He wants to join the MAGA gang without jumping in hole hog.
"We're all lonely suffering victims who need to unite, because together we are strong and can get the Good Things. Like Majestic Mountains, kids riding bikes to the park in the summer, BBQs on the front porch with grandma in her rocker. And fight the evil people who want the Bad Things like decay and filth. It's comical, but look at the MAGA ads for ICE."
("Norman Rockwell’s Family Condemns Homeland Security’s Use of His Work -- In an opinion essay published Sunday in USA Today, Rockwell’s son and other descendants wrote that the paintings had been used without the family’s authorization and that the artist would be “devastated” to see his work 'marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.'")
Here's how most of these "post-liberalism" arguments strike me, seeing as they generally come from people with little to no experience of actually living outside the confines of a liberal society:
"I miss the way things were when I was a child. When I felt enveloped in the nurturing cocoon of what I vaguely understood to be 'society', which held out the promise of a structured, meaningful adulthood—much like the one I assumed my parents were leading (when in fact they were struggling and laboring under stresses I couldn't imagine, and desperately hoping that, at the very least, their children would have more financially sound and secure lives)."
"But what my parents didn't count on was that the lack of struggle and strife would inflict me with an ennui which, when combined with the understanding of the world outside the bubble of my community (which came naturally with leading a more cosmopolitan existence, plus the inter-connected nature of the modern technological age) has left me struggling with questions about the meaning of life which I assume others share and can only be resolved by universal establishment of the social order of my upbringing."
More succinctly, "I had a fun childhood, grew up, became disillusioned, and am now grafting a grand philosophy onto my personal discontent which basically says everyone ought to live in the world I *perceived* to exist in my youth, because it was great."
Yes, I am struck that to the extent Deneen proposes anything concrete it is a vague economic localism. Reminds me of Alain De Benoist: maximalist meta-claim (1776/human rights/liberal democracy/market economy bad), utterly underwhelming specific implications. Municipal monopolies and local guilds (reserved jobs for the local boys?) are unlikely to give give your life the Meaning allegedly destroyed by "(neo)liberalism."
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.
They sound a lot like wokes. Not interested in anything material, theirs is a higher more "spiritual" calling.
Horseshoe theory seemed genuinely laughable to me 6 years ago. Not so much, anymore.
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.
I really like some of Charles Taylor's work (e.g., the Hegel book), but his "communitarianism" is nearly as undercooked as Deneen in my opinion. For some reason these political philosophers never felt/feel the need to say, "And here is the exact country/polity which comes closest to my ideal, and here is why"--which would go a long way towards solving the problem. In other words, Taylor’s communitarianism provides almost no concrete institutional or economic model. It leaves key questions (for me at least) about corporations, scale, and immigration under-theorized/unengaged.
Sandel, on the other hand, drives me nuts. He is perhaps most prestigious figure to oppose kidney markets, and his arguments are terrible.
I think the thing with most of the communitarians (asides from Macintyre) is that in terms of policy they're basically just garden variety liberals. If you asked Taylor he would probably admit this while arguing that his model is more consonant with the liberal welfare state system than Rawlsianism actually is.
I think this points to the basic problem of religion in government, which is the assumption that if we all convert to say Catholicism or Mormonism, then all our problems will solve themselves.
As someone from an Evangelical background from the South, I have known a ton of very devout people with all kinds of personal problems - broken marriages, addictions, violence, sexual abuse (perpetrator and victim), suicide, being generally unemployable, etc. Being Christian did not solve their problems - as Evangelicals often say: "We're not perfect, just forgiven."
Solving social and economic problems requires well-thought out solutions. These solutions can sometimes be relgious or partially religious in nature, but they still need to be well-thought out. I recall Christ himself saying something in the Gospels about a king with an army of 10,000 facing an army of 20,000 - do the freaking math!
"I think this points to the basic problem of religion in government, which is the assumption that if we all convert to say Catholicism or Mormonism, then all our problems will solve themselves."
No serious thinker argues for this position.
The closest I can recall is the Solzhenitsyn quote:
"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’ ... If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened."
But Solzhenitsyn basically meant that without God, political catastrophes become possible; with God, they are less likely (human evil, error, and tragedy still persist though).
I don't see how any of this points to the "basic problem" of religion in government. Can you explain further?
I would argue that Russia always had the same kinds of "disasters" that it had under Soviet rule, even when God was believed in.
Islamic Mauraders believed in God. Pogrom-loving Catholic fanatics believed in God. Witch Trials were conducted by God-fearing Puritans.
Believing in God does not necessarily imply a superior moral transformation. Neither does not believing in God negate such a transformation.
Christians don’t seem inclined to ban the grain market, enabling the starvation of millions, which is something.
I still don’t get how the earlier discussion points to the problem of religion in government.
I'm referring to Deneen's call for Trad/Religion to save us from the evils of Liberalism and its pesky individual rights. That is what he is calling for even if he pretends not to do so.
It's an attempt to intellectualize MAGA, but really, up to this point, MAGA has been nothing but a cult around the orange guy. And what does the orange guy once in power? Boomercon tax cuts, plus some random tariffs which he renegs on every three days or so. What's there to intellectualize?
As I understand Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (without um, having read it) he is advancing the idea that the atomistic value-free liberalism of today, utterly unmoored from human nature and morality, is simply the liberalism of Madison and Jefferson plus time.
No! The American Founders and Framers spoke of nature and nature’s God, they put the strongest emphasis on society’s need for virtue and religion in their new Republic, our rights are only “unalienable” because they’re endowed by our Creator
100%. See Tom West's Political Theory of the American Founding on this.
T h a n k s
FWIW, Deneen's recent book was *widely* considered very bad scholarship, especially among his fellow conservative academics.
Yeah, I kind of liked Why Liberalism Failed (his prior book) at the time it came out, as someone who is potentially sympathetic to his ideas. It seemed to be setting up a philosophical diagnosis for "what's wrong with the world," which would be expanded upon further in time, alongside more detailed remedies for the disease. I was curious how he would follow it up.
When he finally did get around to following it up with Regime Change, I only made it about as far as Richard did. It wasn't good. By failing to build upon the earlier book, which very much needed building upon, his whole project appears rather empty.
To what extent is postliberalism simply warmed over catholic integralism?
“Postliberalism” comprises non-liberal secular conservatives, various kinds of Protestants, Orthodox like Rod Dreher, and plenty of nihilistic trolls as well as Catholic conservatives from hardcore integralists like Adrian Vermeule to the much softer Ed Feser. The Catholics have probably the most detailed positive vision of any of these groups, some of whom are really just negative radicals, but certainly not everyone follows them.
That alone is reason enough to viciously oppose it.
Hanania writes “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.”
First of all, any market economy that includes big firms will end up doing a lot of central planning to manage the intra-company economy. Second a market-based economy consisting of a mixture of employee-owned and operated corporations, family businesses, municipal-owned utilities, and mutual companies, with no government planning besides what we currently do, would count as socialist.
A government run economy is not socialist at all, its state capitalism, what is usually practiced by communists. Actual communism exists only at the small scale, mostly in monasteries.
It’s pretty easy why Deneen won’t come out with concrete policy proposals: he’s hiding his power level. He knows that proposing some catholic integralist government/theocracy would get him rightly driven out of polite society. So he’s stuck trying to criticize liberalism while not overtly providing an alternative. These integralist vermin really need a Cristero war if they push their policies to put them back in their place.
The sad thing about American Catholic Radicals is that they have zero percent chance of ever imposing their religion on the US. The US is a Protestant nation. Unlike Europe we have always been majority Protestant, and even our Post-Christian liberals' ideas are based on Protestant late 1800's Progressivism. Catholicism has always been loathed and mistrusted by a majority of Americans, who would sooner convert to Islam than be Catholic. Not saying this is right or wrong, just that it is.
To me all of this points back to my own "peak liberalism" theory that liberalism has essentially run out of steam after hundreds of years of making sweeping changes to Western Civilization.
And now that liberalism has reached the end of what it can offer to humanity (at least for the time being), the liberal vanguard has been despretely seeking for new dragons to slay, dredging the swamps of marxist, racial, and gender theories to give us a completely new religion that is unfortunately unpalatable to most people (aka "wokeness"), as well as highly corrosive to the bonds of society itself.
Conservatives, who are essentially just liberals who believe in whatever liberals believed in 20-30 years ago, now have no one left to copy, and thus have lost all their bearings on what the future may hold, which leaves them even more vulnerable to demagogues and cultural pandering as well as more likely to turn to an authoritarian leader who will promise them anything.
Bascially, Americans are for the most part doing materially well, but are "spiritually" sick. Most of us have no idea where we are going or what we are doing. Technology is simply changing too fast and culture is changing fast along with it.
I must admit I don't know what the answer is. But I do know that the answer will very likely not come from conservatives because they've never had an idea that a liberal didn't have first. Liberals might be able to right the ship, but first they will have to decisively defeat the socially corrosive "woke" movement that hobbles them. The abundance movement is a step in the right direction, but it lacks the cultural fervor needed.
It's possible some new leader or philosophy will arrive and turn things around, but also possible that things might not turn around. It's both distressing and sad to think that the peak human civilization to date will just give up and die because everyone got bored and stopped caring.
Patrick Deneen is not a liberal from 20 years ago or even 50 years ago type conservative. He rejects nearly all core tenets of classical and progressive liberalism which make it impossible to categorize him in the American political system as either a conservative in the Republican sense or a liberal in the Democratic sense.
Where did you get the idea that Deneen can be dismissed as an uncreative conservative who is essentially a "liberal ... [from] 20-30 years ago" that has nothing to offer to the conversation?
And how does the abundance movement go into the right direction? To my knowledge, it is merely liberalism but this time we flood society with affordable goods in order to maintain politico-economic stability and obfuscate the spiritual void liberalism itself has created. Regarding your point that the abundance movement lacks cultural fervor, it is precisely because of its materialism that it lacks said fervor.
Do you really think that this is a move into the right direction to construct a post-liberal world, which is after your argumentation an inevitability if liberalism has exhausted its potential?
Post-liberalism is still liberalism. Just like postfeminism is still feminism. Postmodernism is still modernism.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Like all right-wing figures, Deneen is a fake and a grifter. How can he not be? He has to make ends, and "trad" living does not pay for itself. Right-wingers want a past that never was. You can't recreate that. Hence zero specifics and lots of wishing.
This is exactly what Post-Liberalism is about. The Post Liberalism that Deneen promotes is accepting precisely that the genie cannot be put back into the bottle.
Deneen acknowledges the accomplishments of liberalism/modernity and argues that we have to find a way to grapple with the socially destructive tendencies of liberalism or else society will cease to exist, at least in any form that resembles a society that places humans at its center. He is not your typical reactionary, he actually offers something new to the discourse.
And I think it is quite dishonest to criticize Deneen for being vague or unempirical when reading his works because they are written in the category of political philosophy not social critique or policy proposals.
When you actually engage with his ideas and not discard him the second you find something remotely critical, you may find something very valuable.
When you are interested in finding out more, I can recommend his UNE Center for Global Humanities talk and if you want to find out more about Deneen's empirical sources you can look into Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam or Murray's Falling Apart. Even though Deneen disagrees with their conclusions, the graphs and data they provide largely support what Deneen is claiming.
I agree with your take on Deneen, though it is interesting that Obama took such a high view of Deneen’s first (I think) book, which trafficked in some of the same vague pronouncements. Maybe Obama just wanted to be seen as engaging with (what was then) counterintuitive and obscure takes.
I'm not saying the book is *good*, but it seems like Deneen's criticism is a lot like the other criticisms of markets that have come out recently. Specifically:
The *relative status* of the working class in the US has gone down greatly. I remember reading a statistic something like "In 1950, white males with a high school diploma had a median income higher than the median income of employed Americans". As late as 1970, working in a steel mill paid as well as being a professor. But due to a number of shifts in the economy, the number of working-class people (income comes from wages, not driven by education or rare skills) whose income is over the median has gone down drastically.
So the complaint is "We are part of the community and you cannot leave us behind!" You can smell this in a lot of these complaints: "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." That is, the smart kids become bankers, but they're not bankers in the towns they grew up in and can't be tapped to pay for all sorts of things in those towns.
But it's difficult to state this clearly because what they want is redistribution (of money and status) from the professional class (not the one percent) to the working class, and it's hard to get a book tour if you say that out loud. It's also hard to fix -- All traditional forms of redistribution benefit the poor as much or more, and the working class is desperate to increase its separation from the poor. (Hence the recent fixation on "work requirements" for social benefits.)
What they want is a leveling of the wage distribution, which seems to be getting the term "predistribution". But that's hard to do except in a mid-20th-century economy, where the bulk of the money moved through a small number of huge, mass employers that were unionized.
I have never read Deneen, but I wouldn't discount postliberalism just because his work is vague and unempirical. Postliberalism is a specific strain of communitarianism, which is itself a highly intellectually rigorous school of political philosophy that dates back to Aristotle. Deneen might make weak arguments and unfounded assumptions; I am not personally familiar enough with his work to say. However, other communitarians have made persuasive and well-founded critiques of liberalism that were previously neglected in American politics. The liberal vs. communitarian dynamic also predates and transcends the left-right spectrum.
From the left, Michael Sandel argued very persuasively that Rawls' theory of justice is wrong by viewing people as atomistic entities that are divorced from the society in which they exist. From the right, Robert Putnam and Roger Scruton were both communitarians who made serious arguments about how modern liberalism has promoted individualism to the point of eroding social bonds and communal associations necessary for a liberal democracy to exist in the first place. Families and communities are weaker and less bound together than in the past. Religious and civic participation are both declining simultaneously. There is a solid but disorganized foundation of evidence to support the basic tenets of postliberalism. There is definitely a way those arguments could be incorporated into a convincing framework, even if Deneen or other writers like Harzony haven't done so.
Everyone loves to be 'oppressed'. That's what Pop-Politics has become. You get up on stage and scream in anger over how The System has ravaged your [insert ethnic/economic/religious denomination/sexual preference here] leaving it in smoking ruins of ash and post-industrial mayonnaise.
We're all lonely suffering victims who need to unite, because together we are strong and can get the Good Things. Like Majestic Mountains, kids riding bikes to the park in the summer, BBQs on the front porch with grandma in her rocker.
And fight the evil people who want the Bad Things like decay and filth.
It's comical, but look at the MAGA ads for ICE. They really has become this sort of idiotic vibe that has no real answers short of emotionally throwing temper tantrums.
I don't know exactly what defines 'post-liberals', if it is as Hanania says, 'socially conservative, economically liberal'. Something about that seems off. They clearly have values they wish to pursue, same as the Left. Which I think is a better comparison. They're essentially a 'National Conservative' group, only because National Socialism was already taken.
I think this is where the whole Left-Right thing breaks down and it's more helpful to simply label them both branches of Collectivism. Ben Shapiro is closer on the scale away from them towards an individualist government, and my preferred spectrum would have a principled stand by government for individual rights, completely seperated from religion, such as Ayn Rand would advocate, before Libertarian-Anarchists at the other endpoint of the spectrum (I'd agree with her that anarchism is an unmitigated evil).
When you back up and view it on this scale, Deneen is just another of the sorry attempts to rationalize what doesn't make any sense and join a clique. That's what all the fuzziness is about. He wants to join the MAGA gang without jumping in hole hog.
Intellectual cowardice.
Andy Blank writes:
"We're all lonely suffering victims who need to unite, because together we are strong and can get the Good Things. Like Majestic Mountains, kids riding bikes to the park in the summer, BBQs on the front porch with grandma in her rocker. And fight the evil people who want the Bad Things like decay and filth. It's comical, but look at the MAGA ads for ICE."
That's timely, indeed!
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/arts/design/norman-rockwell-homeland-security-immigration.html
("Norman Rockwell’s Family Condemns Homeland Security’s Use of His Work -- In an opinion essay published Sunday in USA Today, Rockwell’s son and other descendants wrote that the paintings had been used without the family’s authorization and that the artist would be “devastated” to see his work 'marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.'")
British philosopher John Gray makes a great refutation of the "post-liberal" sensibility here:
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/10/how-to-save-british-liberalism
Apparently Alastair MacIntyre, one of the intellectual guiding lights of this movement, described Rajasthan, India as the ideal post-liberal society!
Here's how most of these "post-liberalism" arguments strike me, seeing as they generally come from people with little to no experience of actually living outside the confines of a liberal society:
"I miss the way things were when I was a child. When I felt enveloped in the nurturing cocoon of what I vaguely understood to be 'society', which held out the promise of a structured, meaningful adulthood—much like the one I assumed my parents were leading (when in fact they were struggling and laboring under stresses I couldn't imagine, and desperately hoping that, at the very least, their children would have more financially sound and secure lives)."
"But what my parents didn't count on was that the lack of struggle and strife would inflict me with an ennui which, when combined with the understanding of the world outside the bubble of my community (which came naturally with leading a more cosmopolitan existence, plus the inter-connected nature of the modern technological age) has left me struggling with questions about the meaning of life which I assume others share and can only be resolved by universal establishment of the social order of my upbringing."
More succinctly, "I had a fun childhood, grew up, became disillusioned, and am now grafting a grand philosophy onto my personal discontent which basically says everyone ought to live in the world I *perceived* to exist in my youth, because it was great."
I think you just decoded the psychology behind this ideology perfectly!
Challenge the empirics?
→ He retreats to “I’m doing philosophy.”
Challenge the philosophy?
→ He pivots to “the real issue is political decay.”
Challenge the policies?
→ He insists he’s “not a policy guy.”
Ask for evidence?
→ He invokes “spiritual degradation,” which can’t be measured.
Press him on any of the above?
→ “Relax, I’m just a comedian.”
Yes, I am struck that to the extent Deneen proposes anything concrete it is a vague economic localism. Reminds me of Alain De Benoist: maximalist meta-claim (1776/human rights/liberal democracy/market economy bad), utterly underwhelming specific implications. Municipal monopolies and local guilds (reserved jobs for the local boys?) are unlikely to give give your life the Meaning allegedly destroyed by "(neo)liberalism."