(Politics and Culture) Patrick J. Deneen-Why Liberalism Failed-Yale University Press (2018)
(Politics and Culture) Patrick J. Deneen-Why Liberalism Failed-Yale University Press (2018)
(Politics and Culture) Patrick J. Deneen-Why Liberalism Failed-Yale University Press (2018)
LIBERALISM FAILED
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Inge
The gap between medieval Christianity’s ruling principle and everyday life is the
great pitfall of the Middle Ages. It is the problem that runs through Gibbon’s
history, which he dealt with by a delicately malicious levity, pricking at every
turn what seemed to him the hypocrisy of the Christian ideal as opposed to
natural human functioning. . . .
Chivalry, the dominant idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between
ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the
warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect
shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons,
enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living
counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith,
upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were
themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness
of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap
between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and
story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is
shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew.
Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order
and resumes his search.
—BARBARA TUCHMAN, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Contents
The Yale University Press series Politics and Culture begins with the premise
that self-government, the hallmark and glory of the United States, the West, and
an expanding number of countries around the world, is ailing. Those who sense
the ailment cannot agree on what it is, much less how it is to be treated; and that
disagreement, only deepening as time passes, is in fact part of the ailment. In the
young twenty-first century, liberal democracy, that system that marries majority
rule with individual rights, has entered a crisis of legitimacy. As practiced in
recent decades, and as an international ordering principle, it has failed to deliver
on its promises to growing, and increasingly mobilized and vocal, numbers of
people.
The symptoms of this ailment are easy to observe: an increasing skew in the
distribution of wealth; decay in traditional institutions, from civic associations to
labor unions to the family; a loss of trust in authority—political, religious, scien-
tific, journalistic—and among citizens themselves; growing disillusionment with
progress in effecting equal justice for all; above all, perhaps, the persistent and
widening polarization between those who want increasingly open and
experimental societies and those who want to conserve various traditional
institutions and practices. The fragmentation not only continues but deepens. As
people sort into new social and political tribes, electoral results confound and
alarm experts and further widen polarization. W. B. Yeats’s line “the center
cannot hold” applies in our fractured societies as much as it did when he wrote it
a century ago. In the age of Trump, it is not even clear where the center is or how
we might rediscover and reoccupy it.
Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, the second book in this series,
locates the source of the legitimacy crisis in liberalism itself. By liberalism,
Deneen has in mind not the narrow definition of popular American discourse,
namely progressive big government or caring government (depending on your
point of view). He means the broader conception familiar to political
philosophers, the set of principles upon which liberal democracies the world
over are built. Why Liberalism Failed pulls together a number of strands of
discontent about liberalism today, strands found in academic, political, and
popular discourse. The result is a bold and far-reaching critique of the root
liberal assumption, associated with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel
Kant, of individual autonomy. We use the “root” metaphor deliberately:
Deneen’s is a radical critique, arguing that liberalism needs not reform but
retirement. The problem is not that liberalism has been hijacked but that its
elevation of individual autonomy was wrong from the start, and the passage of
decades has only made its error more evident.
Scholars have launched radical critiques of liberalism before. From the left
have come broadsides from Marx and his progeny, including the Frankfurt
School, and from postmodern thinkers such as Foucault. From the right have
come attacks from Nietzsche, Schmitt, and traditionalists in the Catholic Church
and other religious institutions. From a location difficult to pinpoint have come
onslaughts from Milbank and Hauerwas. Such critiques inevitably provoke
strong reactions from other scholars and intellectuals. Radical critiques are
designed to do that—to disrupt the dominant discourse and challenge its routine
absorption and redirection of critique, so that people will think more
fundamentally about existing political, social, and economic institutions and
practices.
Readers of all sorts will find that Why Liberalism Failed challenges not only
their thinking but many of their most cherished assumptions about politics and
our political order. Deneen’s book is disruptive not only for the way it links
social maladies to liberalism’s first principles, but also because it is difficult to
categorize along our conventional left-right spectrum. Much of what he writes
will cheer social democrats and anger free-market advocates; much else will
hearten traditionalists and alienate social progressives. Some of these readers
nonetheless will be tempted to place the book in one or another familiar
category, the better to manage and perhaps dismiss its critique. They should
resist that temptation, which is itself a symptom of our polarized times and
perhaps the chief reason why Deneen’s argument is precisely the kind we most
need to hear now.
James Davison Hunter
and John M. Owen IV, Series Editors
Preface
This book was completed three weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Its
main arguments matured over the past decade, before Brexit or President Trump
was even conceivable. 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.
From that vantage, I hinted that such a political condition was ultimately
untenable, and that the likely popular reaction to an increasingly oppressive
liberal order might be forms of authoritarian illiberalism that would promise
citizens power over those forces that no longer seemed under their control:
government, economy, and the dissolution of social norms and unsettled ways of
life. For liberals, this would prove the need for tighter enforcement of a liberal
regime, but they would be blind to how this crisis of legitimacy had been created
by liberalism itself. I did not suggest these conclusions expecting to see such a
dynamic come to pass in my lifetime, and might have written a somewhat
different book in light of recent events. However, I believe my original analysis
still helps us understand the basic outlines of our moment, and avoids the
excessively narrow focus that can come from too deep an immersion in
headlines.
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. The breakdown of
family, community, and religious norms and institutions, especially among those
benefiting least from liberalism’s advance, has not led liberalism’s discontents to
seek a restoration of those norms. That would take effort and sacrifice in a
culture that now diminishes the value of both. Rather, many now look to deploy
the statist powers of liberalism against its own ruling class. Meanwhile, huge
energies are spent in mass protest rather than in self-legislation and deliberation,
reflecting less a renewal of democratic governance than political fury and
despair. Liberalism created the conditions, and the tools, for the ascent of its own
worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge to understand its own
culpability.
While I end this volume by calling on political philosophers for help in
finding a way out of the vise in which we now find ourselves—the mental grip
of those revolutionary ideologies inaugurated in modernity first by liberalism
itself—the better course lies not in any political revolution but in the patient
encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our
depersonalized political and economic order. As the Czech dissident Václav
Havel wrote in “The Power of the Powerless”: “A better system will not
automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a
better life can a better system be developed.”1 Only a politics grounded in the
experience of a polis—lives shared with a sense of common purpose, with
obligations and gratitude arising from sorrows, hopes, and joys lived in
generational time, and with the cultivation of capacities of trust and faith—can
begin to take the place of our era’s distrust, estrangement, hostility, and hatreds.
As my teacher and friend Carey McWilliams wrote at the conclusion of one of
his most penetrating essays, “strengthening [our shared] democratic life is a
difficult, even daunting, task requiring sacrifice and patience more than dazzling
exploits.”2 Sacrifice and patience are not the hallmarks of the age of statist
individualism. But they will be needed in abundance for us to usher in a better,
doubtless very different, time after liberalism.
Acknowledgments
This short book was written in a brief span—after several decades of reflection.
My debts are therefore many, and in some cases the acknowledgment of my
gratitude is long overdue.
The unpayable debts to the late Wilson Carey McWilliams, my friend and
teacher, should be everywhere in evidence on these pages. He would have
written a much better book on the travails of liberalism, but I would trade such a
book for just one more conversation on the state of the world between sips of
bourbon and laughter.
The first ideas of this book were conceived at Rutgers and Princeton, and I
am thankful for generous interlocutors like George Kateb, Robert P. George, and
the late Paul Sigmund. I am grateful to the James Madison Program in American
Ideals and Institutions, and its associate director Brad Wilson, for a timely
fellowship during 2008–9.
Many of these ideas matured during my years at Georgetown University. I
am indebted to Joshua Mitchell, Father James V. Schall, S.J., Father Stephen
Fields, S.J., and two departed friends, Jean Bethke Elshtain and George Carey. I
most gratefully acknowledge the friendship and support of Bill Mumma. I
remain in awe of the many students who together made the Tocqueville Forum
so special during its most glorious years.
At Notre Dame, our lives have been suffused with sustaining friendships. My
gratitude to Phillip Muñoz, Susan Collins, John O’Callaghan, Sean and Christel
Kelsey, Dave O’Connor, Philip Bess, John and Alicia Nagy, Francesca Murphy,
John Betz, John Cavadini, Gerard Bradley, Rick and Nicole Garnett, Jeff
Pojanowski, Martijn Cremers, Father Bill Miscamble, David Solomon, Carter
Snead, Gladden Pappin, Dan Philpott, Mike Griffin, Anna and Michael
Moreland, and Brad Gregory. I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of two
vital programs at the University of Notre Dame, the Center for Ethics and
Culture and the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life,
both which supported completion of this book. My thanks also to Mimi Teixeira,
who assisted with preparation of the manuscript.
More friends than I can possibly acknowledge have helped me in countless
ways, and I hope you find fruits of our conversations here, along with my
deepest gratitude. My thanks to Chad Pecknold, Francis X. Maier, Rod Dreher,
Bill McClay, Jeremy Beer (who suggested a version of the title), Mark Henrie,
Jason Peters, Jeff Polet, Mark Mitchell, Brad Birzer, Phillip Blond, Cindy
Searcy, Dan Mahoney, John Seery, Susan McWilliams, Brad Klingele, and
Michael Hanby. I am grateful to Rusty Reno, David Mills, Dan McCarthy, John
Leo, and Scott Stephens for publishing several early versions of parts of these
chapters. I especially thank Steve Wrinn for his wise counsel and friendship over
so many years.
I’m grateful to the Institute for the Advanced Studies on Culture at the
University of Virginia, particularly James Davison Hunter and John Owen IV,
who expressed early interest in this project. My thanks to Bill Frucht, who urged
me to write short and so gamely championed the book at Yale University Press.
Shortly before the book went to press, two friends of long standing passed
away, Benjamin Barber and Peter Lawler. I would that my teacher Ben and my
valued interlocutor and friend Peter might have been able to read some fruits of
our many conversations and debates. Their voices and ideas are here, and remain
too in the many lives they touched. But still, I miss them both.
To my wife, Inge, and our children Francis, Adrian, and Alexandra, my heart
is full and words fail.
And because so many years have passed since the intimations of this project
began whispering to me, doubtless there are many owed my thanks whom I
haven’t named here. You know who you are. My deepest and abiding gratitude.
WHY LIBERALISM FAILED
Introduction: The End of Liberalism
A
political philosophy conceived some 500 years ago, and put into effect at
the birth of the United States nearly 250 years later, was a wager that
political society could be grounded on a different footing. It conceived
humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for
themselves their own version of the good life. Opportunities for liberty were best
afforded by a limited government devoted to “securing rights,” along with a free-
market economic system that gave space for individual initiative and ambition.
Political legitimacy was grounded on a shared belief in an originating “social
contract” to which even newcomers could subscribe, ratified continuously by
free and fair elections of responsive representatives. Limited but effective
government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials,
and free and fair elections were some of the hallmarks of this ascendant order
and, by all evidence, wildly successful wager.
Today, some 70 percent of Americans believe that their country is moving in
the wrong direction, and half the country thinks its best days are behind it. Most
believe that their children will be less prosperous and have fewer opportunities
than previous generations. Every institution of government shows declining
levels of public trust by the citizenry, and deep cynicism toward politics is
reflected in an uprising on all sides of the political spectrum against political and
economic elites. Elections, once regarded as well-orchestrated performances
meant to convey legitimacy to liberal democracy, are increasingly regarded as
evidence of an impregnably rigged and corrupt system. It is evident to all that
the political system is broken and social fabric is fraying, particularly as a
growing gap increases between wealthy haves and left-behind have-nots, a
hostile divide widens between faithful and secular peoples, and deep
disagreement persists over America’s role in the world. Wealthy Americans
continue to gravitate to gated enclaves in and around select cities, while growing
numbers of Christians compare our times to that of the late Roman Empire and
ponder a fundamental withdrawal from wider American society into updated
forms of Benedictine monastic communities. The signs of the times suggest that
much is wrong with America. A growing chorus of voices even warn that we
may be witnessing the end of the Republic unfolding before our eyes, with some
yet-unnamed regime in the midst of taking its place.
Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and
creators of liberalism has been shattered. The liberal state expands to control
nearly every aspect of life while citizens regard government as a distant and
uncontrollable power, one that only extends their sense of powerlessness by
relentlessly advancing the project of “globalization.” The only rights that seem
secure today belong to those with sufficient wealth and position to protect them,
and their autonomy—including rights of property, the franchise and its
concomitant control over representative institutions, religious liberty, free
speech, and security in one’s papers and abode—is increasingly compromised by
legal intent or technological fait accompli. The economy favors a new
“meritocracy” that perpetuates its advantages through generational succession,
shored up by an educational system that relentlessly sifts winners from losers. A
growing distance between liberalism’s claims and its actuality increasingly spurs
doubts about those claims rather than engendering trust that the gap will be
narrowed.
Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to
itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has “become more
fully itself,” as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-
contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once
deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology. A political
philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry
of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand
liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and
homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines
freedom. Its success can be measured by its achievement of the opposite of what
we have believed it would achieve. Rather than seeing the accumulating
catastrophe as evidence of our failure to live up to liberalism’s ideals, we need
rather to see clearly that the ruins it has produced are the signs of its very
success. To call for the cures of liberalism’s ills by applying more liberal
measures is tantamount to throwing gas on a raging fire. It will only deepen our
political, social, economic, and moral crisis.
This may be a moment for more than mere institutional tinkering. If indeed
something more fundamental and transformative than “normal politics” is
happening, then we are in the midst not just of a political realignment,
characterized by the dying gasp of an old white working class and the lashing
out of debt-burdened youth. We may rather be witnessing an increasingly
systemic failure, due to the bankruptcy of its underlying political philosophy, of
the political system we have largely taken for granted. The fabric of beliefs that
gave rise to the nearly 250-year-old American constitutional experiment may be
nearing an end. While a number of our Founding Fathers believed that they had
lighted on a “new science of politics” that would resist the inevitable tendency of
all regimes to decay and eventually die—even comparing the constitutional
order to an entropy-defying perpetual motion device, “a machine that would go
of itself”—we should rightly wonder whether America is not in the early days of
its eternal life but rather approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption
and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations.
This political philosophy has been for modern Americans like water for a
fish, an encompassing political ecosystem in which we have swum, unaware of
its existence. Liberalism is the first of the modern world’s three great competitor
political ideologies, and with the demise of fascism and communism, it is the
only ideology still with a claim to viability. As ideology, liberalism was the first
political architecture that proposed transforming all aspects of human life to
conform to a preconceived political plan. We live in a society and increasingly a
world that has been remade in the image of an ideology—the first nation
founded by the explicit embrace of liberal philosophy, whose citizenry is shaped
almost entirely by its commitments and vision.
But unlike the visibly authoritarian regimes that arose in dedication to
advancing the ideologies of fascism and communism, liberalism is less visibly
ideological and only surreptitiously remakes the world in its image. In contrast
to its crueler competitor ideologies, liberalism is more insidious: as an ideology,
it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of
shaping the souls under its rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties,
diversions, and attractions of freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It makes itself
invisible, much as a computer’s operating system goes largely unseen—until it
crashes. Liberalism becomes daily more visible precisely because its
deformations are becoming too obvious to ignore. As Socrates tells us in Plato’s
Republic, most humans in most times and places occupy a cave, believing it to
be a complete reality. What’s most insidious about the cave that we occupy is
that its walls are like the backdrops of old movie sets, promising seemingly
endless vistas without constraints or limits, and thus our containment remains
invisible to us.
Among the few iron laws of politics, few seem more unbreakable than the
ultimate unsustainability of ideology in politics. 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.
Thus, even as liberalism has penetrated nearly every nation on earth, its
vision of human liberty seems increasingly to be a taunt rather than a promise.
Far from celebrating the utopic freedom at the “end of history” that seemed
within grasp when the last competing ideology fell in 1989, humanity
comprehensively shaped by liberalism is today burdened by the miseries of its
successes. It pervasively finds itself to be caught in a trap of its own making,
entangled in the very apparatus that was supposed to grant pure and unmitigated
freedom.
We can see this today especially in four distinct but connected areas of our
common life: politics and government, economics, education, and science and
technology. In each of these domains, liberalism has transformed human
institutions in the name of expanding liberty and increasing our mastery and
control of our fates. And in each case, widespread anger and deepening
discontent have arisen from the spreading realization that the vehicles of our
liberation have become iron cages of our captivity.
POLITICS
Citizens of advanced liberal democracies are in near revolt against their own
governments, the “establishment,” and the politicians they have themselves
selected as their leaders and representatives. Overwhelming majorities regard
their governments as distant and unresponsive, captured by the wealthy, and
ruling solely for the advantage of the powerful. At its inception, liberalism
promised to displace an old aristocracy in the name of liberty; yet as it eliminates
every vestige of an old order, the heirs of their hopeful antiaristocratic forebears
regard its replacement as a new, perhaps even more pernicious, kind of
aristocracy.
Liberalism was premised upon the limitation of government and the
liberation of the individual from arbitrary political control. But growing numbers
of citizens regard the government as an entity separate from their own will and
control, not their creature and creation as promised by liberal philosophy. The
“limited government” of liberalism today would provoke jealousy and
amazement from tyrants of old, who could only dream of such extensive
capacities for surveillance and control of movement, finances, and even deeds
and thoughts. The liberties that liberalism was brought into being to protect—
individual rights of conscience, religion, association, speech, and self-
governance—are extensively compromised by the expansion of government
activity into every area of life. Yet this expansion continues, largely as a
response to people’s felt loss of power over the trajectory of their lives in so
many distinct spheres—economic and otherwise—leading to demands for
further intervention by the one entity even nominally under their control. Our
government readily complies, moving like a ratchet wrench, always in one
direction, enlarging and expanding in response to civic grievances, ironically
leading in turn to citizens’ further experience of distance and powerlessness.
Citizens thus feel only tenuously connected to political representatives
whose work was to “refine and enlarge” the public sentiment. Representatives in
turn express their relative powerlessness in relation to a permanent bureaucracy
staffed by career employees whose incentive is to maintain or enlarge their
budgets and activity. More power accrues to the executive branch, which
nominally controls the bureaucracy and through administrative rules can at least
provide the appearance of responsiveness to a restive polity. Political rule by an
increasingly unpopular legislature that theoretically derives its legitimacy from
the people is replaced with commands and mandates of an executive whose
office is achieved by massive influxes of lucre.1 Liberalism claimed to replace
arbitrary rule by distant and popularly unchosen leaders with responsive rule
through elected public servants. Our electoral process today, however, appears
more to be a Potemkin drama meant to convey the appearance of popular
consent for a figure who will exercise incomparable arbitrary powers over
domestic policy, international arrangements, and, especially, war-making.
Such a keenly felt distance and lack of control is not a condition to be solved
by a better and more perfect liberalism—rather, this crisis of governance is the
culmination of the liberal order. Liberalism proposed that occasional consent
would suffice for the elevation of a leadership class composed of those of “fit
characters”—namely those, in the incomparable words of Alexander Hamilton,
concerned with “commerce, finance, negotiation and war, all the objects which
have charms for minds governed by that passion.” The system’s architects
intended to encourage a focus on private concerns among the citizenry—a res
idiotica that they called a “republic.” If there is difficulty “keeping it,” a republic
cannot survive in the absence of “public things.” The belief that liberalism could
achieve modus vivendi by encouraging privatism has culminated in the nearly
complete disassociation of the governing class and a citizenry without a cives.
ECONOMICS
Whether people want the world “reaching into” individuals, corporations, and
nation states is not a matter for discussion, for the process cannot be stopped.
The economic system that simultaneously is both liberalism’s handmaiden and
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. The wages of freedom are bondage to economic
inevitability.
EDUCATION
The rising generation is indoctrinated to embrace an economic and political
system they distinctly fear, filling them with cynicism toward their future and
their participation in maintaining an order they cannot avoid but which they
neither believe in nor trust. Far from feeling themselves to constitute the most
liberated and autonomous generation in history, young adults believe less in their
task at hand than Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountainside. They accede
in the duties demanded of them by their elders, but without joy or love—only
with a keen sense of having no other choice. Their overwhelming response to
their lot—expressed in countless comments they have offered to me over the
years describing their experience and expectations of their own education—is
one of entrapment and “no exit,” of being cynical participants in a system that
ruthlessly produces winners and losers even as it demands that they understand
this system to be a vehicle of “social justice.” One can hardly be surprised that
even the “winners” admit during frank moments that they are both swindlers and
swindled. As one student described the lot of her generation to me:
We are meritocrats out of a survivalist instinct. If we do not race to the very top, the only remaining
option is a bottomless pit of failure. To simply work hard and get decent grades doesn’t cut it
anymore if you believe there are only two options: the very top or rock bottom. It is a classic
prisoner’s dilemma: to sit around for 2–3 hours at the dining hall “shooting the breeze,” or to spend
time engaged in intellectual conversation in moral and philosophical issues, or to go on a date all
detract from time we could be spending on getting to the top and, thus, will leave us worse off
relative to everyone else. . . . Because we view humanity—and thus its institutions—as corrupt and
selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let
down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means
(financial security) to rely only upon ourselves.3
Liberalism’s success today is most visible in the gathering signs of its failure. It
has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics,
economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme
and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular
places, relationships, memberships, and even identities—unless they have been
chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will. The
autonomous self is thus subject to the sovereign trajectory of the very forces
today that are embraced as the tools of our liberation. Yet our liberation renders
us incapable of resisting these defining forces—the promise of freedom results
in thralldom to inevitabilities to which we have no choice but to submit.
These tools were deployed to liberate individuals from the “givenness” of
their condition, especially through “depersonalization” and “abstraction,”
liberalism’s vision of liberty from particular duties, obligations, debts, and
relationships. These ends have been achieved through the depersonalization and
abstraction advanced via two main entities—the state and the market. Yet while
they have worked together in a pincer movement to render us ever more naked
as individuals, our political debates mask this alliance by claiming that
allegiance to one of these forces will save us from the depredations of the other.
Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will
purportedly advance our freedom and security—the space of the market, which
collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs
without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants
and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized
procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain
insufficiently addressed by the market.
Thus the insistent demand that we choose between protection of individual
liberty and expansion of state activity masks the true relation between the state
and market: that they grow constantly and necessarily together. Statism enables
individualism, individualism demands statism. For all the claims about electoral
transformations—for “Hope and Change” or “Making America Great Again”—
two facts are naggingly apparent: modern liberalism proceeds by making us both
more individualist and more statist. This is not because one party advances
individualism without cutting back on statism while the other does the opposite;
rather, both move simultaneously in tune with our deepest philosophic premises.
Claiming to liberate the individual from embedded cultures, traditions,
places, and relationships, liberalism has homogenized the world in its image—
ironically, often fueled by claims of “multiculturalism” or, today, “diversity.”
Having successfully disembedded us from relationships that once made claims
upon us but also informed our conception of selfhood, our sense of ourselves as
citizens sharing a common fate and as economic actors sharing a common world,
liberalism has left the individual exposed to the tools of liberation—leaving us in
a weakened state in which the domains of life that were supposed to liberate us
are completely beyond our control or governance. This suggests that all along,
the individual was the “tool” of the liberal system, not—as was believed—vice
versa.
The most challenging step we must take is a rejection of the belief that the
ailments of liberal society can be fixed by realizing liberalism. The only path to
liberation from the inevitabilities and ungovernable forces that liberalism
imposes is liberation from liberalism itself. Both main political options of our
age must be understood as different sides of the same counterfeit coin. Neither
Progressivism’s faith that liberalism will be realized when we move forward
toward the realization of liberalism’s promise nor Conservatism’s tale that
American greatness will be restored when we reclaim the governing philosophy
of our Constitution offers any real alternative to liberalism’s advance.
The past can instruct, but there can be no return and no “restoration.”
Liberalism has ruthlessly drawn down a reservoir of both material and moral
resources that it cannot replenish. Its successes were always blank checks written
against a future it trusted it could repair. Conservatism rightly observes that
progressivism’s destination is a dead end, and progressivism rightly decries
conservatism’s nostalgia for a time that cannot be restored. Conservatives and
progressives alike have advanced liberalism’s project, and neither as constituted
today can provide the new way forward that must be discerned outside our rutted
path.
Nor does reflecting upon what follows liberalism’s self-destruction imply
that we must simply devise its opposite, or deny what was of great and enduring
value in the achievements of liberalism. Liberalism’s appeal lies in its
continuities with the deepest commitments of the Western political tradition,
particularly efforts to secure liberty and human dignity through the constraint of
tyranny, arbitrary rule, and oppression. In this regard, liberalism is rightly
considered to be based on essential political commitments that were developed
over centuries in classical and Christian thought and practice. Yet liberalism’s
innovations—ones that its architects believed would more firmly secure human
liberty and dignity—which consisted especially of a redefinition of the ideal of
liberty and a reconception of human nature, have undermined the realization of
its stated commitments. Moving beyond liberalism is not to discard some of
liberalism’s main commitments—especially those deepest longings of the West,
political liberty and human dignity—but to reject the false turn it made in its
imposition of an ideological remaking of the world in the image of a false
anthropology.
A rejection of the world’s first and last remaining ideology does not entail its
replacement with a new and doubtless not very different ideology. Political
revolution to overturn a revolutionary order would produce only disorder and
misery. A better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance:
practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the
anticulture of liberalism.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, he observed that Americans tended to act differently from
and better than their individualistic and selfish ideology. “They do more honor to
their philosophy than to themselves,” he wrote. What’s needed now is not to
perfect our philosophy any further but to again do more honor to ourselves. Out
of the fostering of new and better selves, porously invested in the fate of other
selves—through the cultivation of cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice,
and small-scale democracy—a better practice might arise, and from it,
ultimately, perhaps a better theory than the failing project of liberalism.
CHAPTER ONE
Unsustainable Liberalism
T
HE deepest commitment of liberalism is expressed by the name itself:
liberty. Liberalism has proven both attractive and resilient because of this
core commitment to the longing for human freedom so deeply embedded
in the human soul. Liberalism’s historical rise and global attraction are hardly
accidental; it has appealed especially to people subject to arbitrary rule, unjust
inequality, and pervasive poverty. No other political philosophy had proven in
practice that it could fuel prosperity, provide relative political stability, and foster
individual liberty with such regularity and predictability. There were plausible
grounds why, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama could declare that the long debate over
ideal regimes had ended, and that liberalism was the end station of History.
Liberalism did not, of course, discover or invent the human longing for
liberty: the word libertas is of ancient origin, and its defense and realization have
been a primary goal from the first forays into political philosophy in ancient
Greece and Rome. The foundational texts of the Western political tradition
focused especially on the question how to constrain the impulse to and assertions
of tyranny, and characteristically settled upon the cultivation of virtue and self-
rule as the key correctives to the tyrannical temptation. The Greeks especially
regarded self-government as a continuity from the individual to the polity, with
the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance, wisdom,
moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered. Self-
governance in the city was possible only if the virtue of self-governance
governed the souls of citizens; and self-governance of individuals could be
realized only in a city that understood that citizenship itself was a kind of
ongoing habituation in virtue, through both law and custom. Greek philosophy
stressed paideia, or education in virtue, as a primary path to forestalling the
establishment of tyranny and protecting liberty of citizens, yet these conclusions
coexisted (if at times at least uneasily) with justifications of inequality
exemplified not only in calls for rule by a wise ruler of a class of rulers, but in
the pervasiveness of slavery.
The Roman and then medieval Christian philosophical traditions retained the
Greek emphasis upon the cultivation of virtue as a central defense against
tyranny, but also developed institutional forms that sought to check the power of
leaders while (to varying degrees) opening routes to informal and sometimes
formal expression of popular opinion in political rule. Many of the institutional
forms of government that we today associate with liberalism were at least
initially conceived and developed over long centuries preceding the modern age,
including constitutionalism, separation of powers, separate spheres of church
and state, rights and protections against arbitrary rule, federalism, rule of law,
and limited government.1 Protection of rights of individuals and the belief in
inviolable human dignity, if not always consistently recognized and practiced,
were nevertheless philosophical achievements of premodern medieval Europe.
Some scholars regard liberalism simply as the natural development, and indeed
the culmination, of protoliberal thinking and achievements of this long period of
development, and not as any sort of radical break from premodernity.2
While this claim is worthy of respectful consideration, given readily evident
continuities, nevertheless contesting claims that a significant break occurred
between modernity and premodernity—specifically that a novel political
philosophy arose in distinction to premodern forebears—has considerable
warrant. Indeed, the very institutional and even semantic continuities between
classical and Christian premodernity and the modern period that eventuates in
the rise of liberalism can be deceptive. The achievement of liberalism was not
simply a wholesale rejection of its precedents, but in many cases attained its
ends by redefining shared words and concepts and, through that redefinition,
colonizing existing institutions with fundamentally different anthropological
assumptions.
Liberty was fundamentally reconceived, even if the word was retained.
Liberty had long been believed to be the condition of self-rule that forestalled
tyranny, within both the polity and the individual soul. Liberty was thus thought
to involve discipline and training in self-limitation of desires, and corresponding
social and political arrangements that sought to inculcate corresponding virtues
that fostered the arts of self-government. Classical and Christian political
thought was self-admittedly more “art” than “science”: it relied extensively on
the fortunate appearance of inspiring founding figures and statesmen who could
uphold political and social self-reinforcing virtuous cycles, and acknowledged
the likelihood of decay and corruption as an inevitable feature of any human
institution.
A signal hallmark of modernity was the rejection of this long-standing view
of politics. Social and political arrangements came to be regarded as
simultaneously ineffectual and undesirable. The roots of liberalism lay in efforts
to overturn a variety of anthropological assumptions and social norms that had
come to be believed as sources of pathology—namely, fonts of conflict as well
as obstacles to individual liberty. The foundations of liberalism were laid by a
series of thinkers whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded
were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might
in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of
conscience and action.
Three main efforts undergirded this revolution in thought and practice. First,
politics would be based upon reliability of “the low” rather than aspiration to
“the high.” The classical and Christian effort to foster virtue was rejected as both
paternalistic and ineffectual, prone to abuse and unreliability. It was Machiavelli
who broke with the classical and Christian aspiration to temper the tyrannical
temptation through an education in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic
tradition as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fantasies of
“imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and
never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they
ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to
live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy
himself, not how to preserve himself.”3 Rather than promoting unrealistic
standards for behavior—especially self-limitation—that could at best be
unreliably achieved, Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy
upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed, and the
quest for glory. He argued further that liberty and political security were better
achieved by pitting different domestic classes against one another, encouraging
each to limit the others through “ferocious conflict” in the protection of their
particular interests rather than by lofty appeals to a “common good” and political
concord. By acknowledging ineradicable human selfishness and the desire for
material goods, one might conceive of ways to harness those motivations rather
than seeking to moderate or limit those desires.
Second, the classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue and the cultivation
of self-limitation and self-rule relied upon reinforcing norms and social
structures arrayed extensively throughout political, social, religious, economic,
and familial life. What were viewed as the essential supports for a training in
virtue—and hence, preconditions for liberty from tyranny—came to be viewed
as sources of oppression, arbitrariness, and limitation. Descartes and Hobbes in
turn argued that the rule of irrational custom and unexamined tradition—
especially religious belief and practice—was a source of arbitrary governance
and unproductive internecine conflicts, and thus an obstacle to a stable and
prosperous regime. Each proposed remediating the presence of custom and
tradition by introducing “thought experiments” that reduced people to their
natural essence—conceptually stripping humans of accidental attributes that
obscured from us our true nature—so that philosophy and politics could be based
upon a reasoned and reflective footing. Both expressed confidence in a more
individualistic rationality that could replace long-standing social norms and
customs as guides for action, and each believed that potential deviations from
rationality could be corrected by the legal prohibitions and sanctions of a
centralized political state.
Third, if political foundations and social norms required correctives to
establish stability and predictability, and (eventually) to enlarge the realm of
individual freedom, the human subjection to the dominion and limits of nature
needed also to be overcome. A “new science of politics” was to be accompanied
by a new natural science—in particular, a science that would seek practical
applications meant to give humans a chance in the war against nature. Hobbes’s
employer, Francis Bacon, encouraged a new form of natural philosophy that
would increase human empire over the natural world, providing for “relief of the
human estate” through the expansion of useful applications of human
knowledge.4 A revolution in modern science thus called as well for overturning
such philosophical traditions as Stoicism and Christian emphasis upon
“acceptance” in favor of belief in an expanding and potentially limitless human
capacity to control circumstance and effect human desires upon the world.
While none of these thinkers was a liberal, given their respective reservations
regarding popular rule, their revolutionary reconception of politics, society,
science, and nature laid the foundation of modern liberalism. A succession of
thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three
basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from
established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the
expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing
scientific discovery and economic prosperity. Liberalism’s ascent and triumph
required sustained efforts to undermine the classical and Christian understanding
of liberty, the disassembling of widespread norms, traditions, and practices, and
perhaps above all the reconceptualization of primacy of the individual defined in
isolation from arbitrary accidents of birth, with the state as the main protector of
individual rights and liberty.
The liberal adoption of these revolutions in thought and practice constituted
a titanic wager that a wholly new understanding of liberty could be pursued and
realized by overturning preceding philosophic tradition and religious and social
norms, and by introducing a new relationship between humans and nature. What
has become the literal “Whig” interpretation of political history widely holds
that this wager has been an uncontested success. The advent of liberalism marks
the end of a benighted age, the liberation of humanity from darkness, the
overcoming of oppression and arbitrary inequality, the descent of monarchy and
aristocracy, the advance of prosperity and modern technology, and the advent of
an age of nearly unbroken progress. Liberalism is credited with the cessation of
religious war, the opening of an age of tolerance and equality, the expanding
spheres of personal opportunity and social interaction that today culminate in
globalization, and the ongoing victories over sexism, racism, colonialism,
heteronormativity, and a host of other unacceptable prejudices that divide,
demean, and segregate.
Liberalism’s victory was declared to be unqualified and complete in 1989 in
the seminal article “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, written
following the collapse of the last competing ideological opponent.5 Fukuyama
held that liberalism had proved itself the sole legitimate regime on the basis that
it had withstood all challengers and defeated all competitors and further, that it
worked because it accorded with human nature. A wager that was some five
centuries in the making, and had been first instantiated as a political experiment
by the Founders of the American liberal republic exactly two hundred years
before Fukuyama’s bold claim, had panned out with unprecedented clarity in the
often muddled and contested realm of political philosophy and practice.
A main result of the widespread view that liberalism’s triumph is complete
and uncontested—indeed, that rival claims are no longer regarded as worthy of
consideration—is a conclusion within the liberal order that various ills that infect
the body politic as well as the civil and private spheres are either remnants of
insufficiently realized liberalism or happenstance problems that are subject to
policy or technological fix within the liberal horizon. Liberalism’s own success
makes it difficult to sustain reflection on the likelihood that the greatest current
threat to liberalism lies not outside and beyond liberalism but within it. The
potency of this threat arises from the fundamental nature of liberalism, from
what are thought to be its very strengths—especially its faith in its ability of self-
correction and its belief in progress and continual improvement—which make it
largely impervious to discerning its deepest weaknesses and even self-inflicted
decline. No matter our contemporary malady, there is no challenge that can’t be
fixed by a more perfect application of liberal solutions.
These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest
—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon
virtue. Not only is this malady increasingly manifest in all social interactions and
institutions, but it infiltrates liberal politics. Undermining any appeal to common
good, it induces a zero-sum mentality that becomes nationalized polarization for
a citizenry that is increasingly driven by private and largely material concerns.
Similarly, the “cure” by which individuals could be liberated from authoritative
cultures generates social anomie that requires expansion of legal redress, police
proscriptions, and expanded surveillance. For instance, because social norms and
decencies have deteriorated and an emphasis on character was rejected as
paternalistic and oppressive, a growing number of the nation’s school districts
now deploy surveillance cameras in schools, anonymous oversight triggering
post-facto punishment. The cure of human mastery of nature is producing
consequences that suggest such mastery is at best temporary and finally illusory:
ecological costs of burning of fossil fuels, limits of unlimited application of
antibiotics, political fallout from displacement of workforce by technology, and
so forth. Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive
progress.
Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and
resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The
loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly,
communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism
and is the source of its deepest instability. The increased focus upon, and
intensifying political battles over, the role of centralized national and even
international governments is at once the consequence of liberalism’s move
toward homogenization and one of the indications of its fragility. The global
market displaces a variety of economic subcultures, enforcing a relentless logic
of impersonal transactions that have led to a crisis of capitalism and the specter
of its own unraveling. Battles in policy areas such as education and health care—
in which either the state or the market is proposed as providing the resolution—
reflect the weakening of forms of care that drew on more local commitments and
devotions that neither the state nor market can hope to replicate or replace. The
triumphant march of liberalism has succeeded in at once drawing down the
social and natural resources that liberalism did not create and cannot replenish,
but which sustained liberalism even as its advance eroded its own
unacknowledged foundations.
Liberalism has been a wager that it can produce more benefits than the costs
it would amass, all the while rendering liberal humanity widely insensate to the
fact that the mounting costs are the result of those touted benefits. Thus most
today view this wager as a settled bet, a question whose outcome is no longer in
question. Yet the gathering evidence, once seen clearly as not circumstantially
generated but arising directly from liberalism’s fruition, reveals that the bookie’s
collector is knocking upon the door. While we have been slow to realize that the
odds were in favor of the house, the damning evidence arising from liberalism’s
very success affirms that only blinkered ideology can conceal liberalism’s
unsustainability.
The strictly legal and political arrangements of modern constitutionalism do
not per se constitute a liberal regime, but they are animated by two foundational
beliefs. Liberalism is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper
anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation
and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of
choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature. These two
revolutions in the understanding of human nature and society constitute
“liberalism” inasmuch as they introduce a radically new definition of “liberty.”
LIBERAL VOLUNTARISM
The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to
base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the unfettered and autonomous
choice of individuals. This argument was first articulated in the protoliberal
defense of monarchy by Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, human beings
exist by nature in a state of radical independence and autonomy. Recognizing the
fragility of a condition in which life in such a state is “nasty, brutish, and short,”
they employ their rational self-interest to sacrifice most of their natural rights in
order to secure the protection and security of a sovereign. Legitimacy is
conferred by consent.
The state is created to restrain the external actions of individuals and legally
restricts the potentially destructive activity of radically separate human beings.
Law is a set of practical restraints upon self-interested individuals; Hobbes does
not assume the existence of self-restraint born of mutual concern. As he writes in
Leviathan, law is comparable to hedges, “not to stop travelers, but to keep them
in the way”; that is, law restrains people’s natural tendency to act on “impetuous
desires, rashness or indiscretion,” and thus always acts as an external constraint
upon our natural liberty.6 By contrast, liberty persists “where there is silence of
the law,” limited only insofar as the “authorized” rules of the state are explicit.7
Only the state can limit our natural liberty: the state is the sole creator and
enforcer of positive law, and it even determines legitimate and illegitimate
expressions of religious belief. The state is charged with maintaining social
stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy; in so doing, it “secures” our
natural rights.
Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and
autonomous. Liberalism begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human
relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes
increasingly dependent on whether those relationships have been chosen, and
chosen on the basis of their service to rational self-interest.
As Hobbes’s philosophical successor John Locke understood, voluntarist
logic ultimately affects all relationships, including familial ones. Locke—the
first philosopher of liberalism—on the one hand acknowledges in his Second
Treatise of Government that the duties of parents to raise children and the
corresponding duties of children to obey spring from the commandment “Honor
thy father and mother,” but he further claims that every child must ultimately
subject his inheritance to the logic of consent, and thus begin (evoking the origin
of human society) in a version of the State of Nature in which we act as
autonomous choosing individuals. “For every Man’s Children being by Nature as
free as himself, or any of his Ancestors ever were, may, whilst they are in that
Freedom, choose what Society they will join themselves to, what Common-
wealths they will put themselves under. But if they will enjoy the Inheritance of
their Ancestors, they must take it on the same terms their Ancestors had it, and
submit to all the Conditions annex’d to such a Possession.”8 Even those who
adopt the inheritance of their parents in every regard do so only through the logic
of consent, even if it is tacit.
Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose
conditions are temporary and subject to revision, particularly once the child-
rearing duties are completed. If this encompassing logic of choice applies to the
most elemental family relationships, then it applies all the more to the looser ties
that bind people to other institutions and associations, in which membership is
subject to constant monitoring and assessment of whether it benefits or unduly
burdens any person’s individual rights.
This is not to suggest that a preliberal era dismissed the idea of individual
free choice. Among other significant ways that preliberal Christianity
contributed to an expansion of human choice was to transform the idea of
marriage from an institution based upon familial and property considerations to a
choice made by consenting individuals on the basis of sacramental love. What
was new is that the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations,
memberships, and even personal relationships became dominated by
considerations of individual choice based on the calculation of individual self-
interest, and without broader consideration of the impact of one’s choices upon
the community, one’s obligations to the created order, and ultimately to God.
Liberalism began with the explicit assertion that it merely describes our
political, social, and private decision making. Yet it was implicitly constituted as
a normative project: what it presented as a description of human voluntarism in
fact had to displace a very different form of human self-understanding and
experience. In effect, liberal theory sought to educate people to think differently
about themselves and their relationships. Liberalism often claims neutrality
about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,”
not any particular conception of the “Good.”
Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In
the same way that courses in economics claim merely to describe human beings
as utility-maximizing individual actors, but in fact influence students to act more
selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt
flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic
relationships seen as fungible and subject to constant redefinition, so are all
relationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion.
Liberalism encourages loose connections.
T
HE basic division of modern politics since the French Revolution has been
between the left and the right, reflecting the respective sides of the French
National Assembly, where revolutionaries congregated to the left and
royalists gathered to the right. The terms have persisted because they capture
two basic and opposite worldviews. The left is characterized by a preference for
change and reform, a commitment to liberty and equality, an orientation toward
progress and the future, while the right is the party of order and tradition,
hierarchy, and a disposition to valorize the past. Whether described as left vs.
right, blue vs. red, or liberal vs. conservative, this basic division seems to capture
a permanent divide between two fundamental human dispositions, as well as two
worldviews that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of political
options. If one of the first questions posed to new parents is whether the baby is
a girl or a boy, the question likely to define us from young adulthood is whether
we place ourselves on the political left or the political right.
Much contemporary life is organized around this basic division—not only
the political machinery, with its plethora of liberal or conservative
commentators, media, consultants, pollsters, and politicians sorted according to
these labels—but neighborhoods, professions, schools, even one’s choice of
religion.1 People are apt to feel more in common with others who share a
political outlook even if they are from a different area of the country (or even
foreigners), a different ethnic or racial background, and—remarkably, given the
history of religious warfare—a different religion. Today, a conservative
Protestant evangelical is more likely to befriend and trust an Orthodox Jew or
traditionalist Catholic than a liberal Lutheran. A white liberal southerner is likely
to be more comfortable revealing political outlooks to a black northern
Democrat than to a white conservative in his neighborhood. A progressive
homosexual and a liberal Christian will quickly recognize commonalities. More
than ever, as we enter an era when the use of sexually differentiating pronouns is
discouraged on college campuses and regional differences dissipate into the stew
of our national monoculture, political alignment seems to be the one remaining
marker that is inescapable and eternal, even natural and inevitable, defining the
core of our identity.
Given the extent to which this basic divide shapes the outlooks of nearly
every politically aware person living in an advanced liberal society today, it
seems almost unthinkable to suggest that it is far less than it seems—and indeed
that the apparent unbridgeability of the chasm separating the two sides merely
masks a more fundamental, shared worldview. The project of advancing the
liberal order takes the superficial form of a battle between seemingly intractable
foes, and the energy and acrimony of that contest shrouds a deeper cooperation
that ends up advancing liberalism as a whole.
The modern American landscape is occupied by two parties locked in
permanent battle. One, deemed “conservative,” advances the project of
individual liberty and equality of opportunity especially through defense of a
free and unfettered market; the other, deemed liberal, aims at securing greater
economic and social equality through extensive reliance upon the regulatory and
judicial powers of the national government. Our dominant political narrative pits
defenders of individual liberty—articulated by such authors of the liberal
tradition as John Locke and the American Founding Fathers—against the statism
of “progressive” liberals inspired by figures like John Stuart Mill and John
Dewey. The two worldviews are regarded as irreconcilable opposites.
These apparently contrary positions are familiar to even the casual observer
of contemporary American politics, with conservatives—heirs to classical
liberalism—typically decrying statism and liberals—heirs to progressivism—
criticizing individualism. The two sides contest every policy over this basic
division, touching on contemporary debates over economic and trade policy,
health care, welfare, the environment, and a host of hotly contested issues. These
battles often come down to a basic debate over whether the ends of the polity are
best achieved by market forces with relatively little interference by the state, or
by government programs that can distribute benefits and support more justly
than the market can achieve.
Thus classical liberals claim that the individual is fundamental and, through
an act of contract and consent, brings into existence a limited government.
Progressive liberals claim that the individual is never wholly self-sufficient, and
that we must instead understand ourselves to be more deeply defined by
membership in a larger unit of humanity. Because the two sides appear to be
defined not only by a gaping policy divide but by different anthropological
assumptions, their deeper shared undercurrent can be difficult to discern.
Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and
always at the expense of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both
the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our
membership in the state. In distinct but related ways, the right and left cooperate
in the expansion of both statism and individualism, although from different
perspectives, using different means, and claiming different agendas. This deeper
cooperation helps to explain how it has happened that contemporary liberal
states—whether in Europe or America—have become simultaneously both more
statist, with ever more powers and activity vested in central authority, and more
individualistic, with people becoming less associated and involved with such
mediating institutions as voluntary associations, political parties, churches,
communities, and even family. For both “liberals” and “conservatives,” the state
becomes the main driver of individualism, while individualism becomes the
main source of expanding power and authority of the state.
This deeper continuity between right and left derives from two main sources:
first, philosophical, with both the classical and progressive liberal traditions
arguing ultimately for the central role of the state in the creation and expansion
of individualism; and second, practical and political, with this joint philosophical
project strengthening an expansion of both state power and individualism. In the
previous chapter I briefly limned how the two “sides” of liberalism, while
apparently locked in intense contestation, together advance the main objects of
the liberal project. In this chapter, I explore this deeper cooperative endeavor in
more detail, with particular attention to both the philosophical sources within the
liberal tradition and their application in the American context.
Both “classical” and “progressive” liberalism ground the advance of
liberalism in individual liberation from the limitations of place, tradition, culture,
and any unchosen relationship. Both traditions—for all their differences over
means—can be counted as liberal because of this fundamental commitment to
liberation of the individual and to the use of natural science, aided by the state,
as a primary means for achieving practical liberation from nature’s limitations.
Thus statism and individualism grow together while local institutions and respect
for natural limits diminish. For all their differences, this ambition animated
thinkers ranging from John Locke to John Dewey, from Francis Bacon to Francis
Bellamy, from Adam Smith to Richard Rorty.
The most apt recent symbol of the progressive state’s role in “creating” the
individual was a fictional woman who famously formed part of President
Obama’s campaign for reelection in 2012—a woman who, like Cher or
Madonna, needed only a single name, Julia. Julia appeared briefly toward the
beginning of Obama’s campaign as a series of internet slides in which it was
demonstrated that she had achieved her dreams through a series of government
programs that, throughout her life, had enabled various milestones. Part of the
effort to show the existence of a Republican “war on women,” the ad campaign
“Life of Julia” was designed to convince female voters that only progressive
liberals would support the government programs that would help them achieve a
better life.15
While the “Life of Julia” campaign seemed thus designed for liberals who
generally supported government programs that helped foster economic
opportunity and greater equality, Julia was nevertheless someone who could not
be an object of admiration without the background appeal of conservative
liberalism’s valorization of the autonomous individual as the normative ideal of
human liberty. If the positive portrayal of Julia’s extensive reliance upon
government aid tended to make the right blind to the ad’s fundamentally liberal
ideal of autonomy, the left was barely cognizant that the aim of this assistance
was to create the most perfectly autonomous individual since Hobbes and Locke
dreamed up the State of Nature. In Julia’s world there are only Julia and the
government, with the very brief exception of a young child who appears in one
slide—with no evident father—and is quickly whisked away by a government-
sponsored yellow bus, never to be seen again. Otherwise, Julia has achieved a
life of perfect autonomy, courtesy of a massive, sometimes intrusive, always
solicitous, ever-present government. The world portrayed by “Life of Julia” is an
updated version of the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which there only
exist individuals and the sovereign state—the former creating and giving
legitimacy to the latter, the latter ensuring a safe and secure life for the
individuals who brought it into being. The main difference is that while
Hobbes’s story is meant as a thought experiment, “The Life of Julia” is meant to
depict present-day reality. But the ad makes increasingly clear that its story is the
very opposite of Hobbes’s: it is the liberal state that creates the individual.
Through the increasingly massive and all-encompassing Leviathan, we are
finally free of one another.
Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing
contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from
constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom.
Behind the lines, however, both have consistently sought the expansion of the
sphere of liberation in which the individual can best pursue his or her preferred
lifestyle, leading to mutual support of the expansion of the state as the requisite
setting in which the autonomous individual could come into being. While
“conservative” liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they
consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a
way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that
might limit the market’s role in the life of a community.16 And while
“progressive” liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of
individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to
enforcement of “manners and morals,” preferring the open marketplace of
individual “buyers and sellers,” especially in matters of sexual practice and
infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices
over ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently expands to
enlarge our self-definition as “consumers”—a word more often used today to
describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than “citizens”—while entertaining
us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect
aren’t that different after all.
The individualism arising from the philosophy and practice of liberalism, far
from fundamentally opposing an increasingly centralized state, both required it
and in fact increased its power. Indeed, individualism and statism have
powerfully combined to all but rout the vestiges of pre- and often nonliberal
communities animated by a philosophy and practice distinct from statist
individualism. Today’s classical liberals and progressive liberals remain locked
in a battle for their preferred end game—whether we will be a society of ever
more perfectly liberated, autonomous individuals or ever more egalitarian
members of the global “community”—but while this debate continues apace, the
two sides agree on their end while absorbing our attention in disputes over the
means, thus combining in a pincer movement to destroy the vestiges of the
classical practices and virtues that they both despise.
The expansion of liberalism rests upon a vicious and reinforcing cycle in
which state expansion secures the end of individual fragmentation, in turn
requiring further state expansion to control a society without shared norms,
practices, or beliefs. Liberalism thus increasingly requires a legal and
administrative regime, driven by the imperative of replacing all nonliberal forms
of support for human flourishing (such as schools, medicine, and charity), and
hollowing any deeply held sense of shared future or fate among the citizenry.
Informal relationships are replaced by administrative directives, political
policies, and legal mandates, undermining voluntary civic membership and
requiring an ever-expanding state apparatus to ensure social cooperation. The
threat and evidence of declining civic norms require centralized surveillance,
highly visible police presence, and a carceral state to control the effects of its
own successes while diminishing civic trust and mutual commitment.
The ways in which the individualist philosophy of classical liberalism and
the statist philosophy of progressive liberalism end up reinforcing each other
often go undetected. Although conservative liberals claim to defend not only a
free market but family values and federalism, the only part of the conservative
agenda that has been continuously and successfully implemented during their
recent political ascendance is economic liberalism, including deregulation,
globalization, and the protection of titanic economic inequalities. And while
progressive liberals claim to advance a shared sense of national destiny and
solidarity that should decrease the advance of an individualist economy and
reduce income inequality, the only part of the left’s political agenda that has
triumphed has been the project of personal and especially sexual autonomy. Is it
mere coincidence that both parties, despite their claims to be locked in a political
death grip, mutually advance the cause of liberal autonomy and inequality?
CHAPTER THREE
Liberalism as Anticulture
T
HE dual expansion of the state and personal autonomy rests extensively on
the weakening and eventual loss of particular cultures, and their
replacement not by a single liberal culture but by a pervasive and
encompassing anticulture. What is popularly called a “culture,” often modified
by an adjective—for instance, “pop culture” or “media culture” or
“multiculturalism”—is in fact a sign of the evisceration of culture as a set of
generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and
particular settings. As Mario Vargas Llosa has written, “The idea of culture has
broadened to such an extent that, although nobody has dared to say this
explicitly, it has disappeared. It has become an ungraspable, multitudinous and
figurative ghost.”1 The only forms of shared cultural “liturgy” that remain are
celebrations of the liberal state and the liberal market. National holidays have
become occasions for shopping, and shopping holy days such as “Black Friday”
have become national holidays. These forms of abstract membership mark a
populace delinked from particular affiliations and devotions, which are
transferred to—in a video played at the 2012 Democratic National Convention
—“the only thing we all belong to,” the liberal state. This ambitious claim failed
to note that the only thing we all belong to is the global market, an
encompassing entity that contains all political organizations and their citizenry,
now redefined as consumers. The liturgies of nation and market are woven
closely together (the apogee of which is the celebration of commercials during
the Super Bowl), simultaneously nationalist and consumerist celebrations of
abstracted membership that reify individuated selves held together by
depersonalized commitments. In the politically nationalist and economically
globalist setting, these contentless liturgies often take the form of two minutes of
obligatory patriotism in which a member of the armed services appears during
pauses in a sporting event for reverential applause before everyone gets back to
the serious business of distracted consumption. The show of superficial thanks
for a military with which few have any direct connection leaves an afterglow that
distracts from the harder question of whether the national military ultimately
functions to secure the global market and so support the construction of
abstracted, deracinated, and consumptive selves.
Liberal Timelessness
More than a system of government or legal and political order, liberalism is
about redefining the human perception of time. It is an effort to transform the
experience of time, in particular the relationship of past, present, and future.
Social contract theory was about the abstraction of the individual not only
from human relations and places but also from time. It depicts a history-less and
timeless condition, a thought experiment intended to be applicable at any and all
times. The most obvious reason for this conceit—that we be invited to see its
relevance in any circumstance, as Hobbes famously argues in pointing out such
everyday activities as locking our chests and doors—obscures the deeper lesson
that humans are by nature creatures who live in an eternal present. The conceit
appeals not to some historical “social contract” that we must look back to for
guidance but to the continual, ongoing belief that we are always by nature
autonomous choosing agents who perceive advantage for ourselves in an
ongoing contractual arrangement. Once again, however, liberal theory posits a
form of existence that contradicts what most people’s actual experience was
before liberal society brought its “natural” conditions into existence. Only with
the ascendancy of liberal political orders does the experience of history in its
fullest temporal dimension wane, and a pervasive presentism become a dominant
feature of life. This condition is achieved especially through the dismantling of
culture, the vessel of the human experience of time.
The development of progressivism within liberalism is only a further
iteration of this pervasive presentism, a kind of weaponized timelessness. Like
classical liberalism, progressivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the
past, particularly tradition and custom. While widely understood to be future-
oriented, it in fact rests on simultaneous assumptions that contemporary
solutions must be liberated from past answers but that the future will have as
much regard for our present as we have for the past. The future is an unknown
country, and those who live in a present arrayed in hostility to the past must
acquire indifference toward, and a simple faith in, a better if unknowable future.
Those whose view of time is guided by such belief implicitly understand that
their “achievements” are destined for the dustbin of history, given that the future
will regard us as backward and necessarily superseded. Every generation must
live for itself. Liberalism makes humanity into mayflies, and unsurprisingly, its
culmination has led each generation to accumulate scandalous levels of debt to
be left for its children, while rapacious exploitation of resources continues in the
progressive belief that future generations will devise a way to deal with the
depletions.
This transformation of the experience of time has been described in terms of
two distinct forms of time: whereas preliberal humanity experienced time as
cyclical, modernity thinks of it as linear. While suggestive and enlightening, this
linear conception of time is still premised on a fundamental continuity between
past, present, and future. Liberalism in its several guises in fact advances a
conception of fractured time, of time fundamentally disconnected, and shapes
humans to experience different times as if they were radically different countries.
Alexis de Tocqueville noted the connection between the rise of liberal orders
and the experience of fractured time. He observed that liberal democracy would
be marked above all by a tendency toward presentism. In its egalitarianism and
especially in its rejection of aristocracy, it would be suspicious of the past and
future, encouraging instead a kind of stunted individualism. Aristocracy,
Tocqueville wrote, “links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain.
Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link. . . . Thus, not only does
democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their
descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever
thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in
the solitude of his own heart.”6
Tocqueville perceived the way in which “fractured time” generates
individualism, which in turn would have profound social, political, and
economic consequences as the underlying logic of liberal democracy advances.
He fretted especially about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see
their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and hence to consider
long-term implications of their actions and deeds as part of a long-term human
community. While a constitutive feature of an aristocratic age was the pervasive
understanding of oneself as defined by one’s place in a generational order, a
hallmark of democracy was to “break” that chain in the name and pursuit of
liberation of the individual. While beneficial for individual liberation from
generational definition and debts, the fractured experience of time was to have
baleful political implications. Modern liberal democracies, Tocqueville believed,
would have a powerful tendency to act only for the short term, thus to discount
the consequences of their actions upon future generations:
Once [liberal democrats] have grown accustomed not to think about what will happen after their
life, they easily fall back into a complete and brutish indifference about the future, an attitude all too
well suited to certain propensities in human nature. As soon as they have lost the way of relying
chiefly upon distant hopes, they are naturally led to want to satisfy their least desires at once. . . .
[Thus] there is always a danger that men will give way to ephemeral and casual desires and that,
wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may never achieve
anything great or calm or lasting.7
Tocqueville notes that the propensity to think only within the context of
one’s own lifespan, and to focus on satisfaction of immediate and baser
pleasures, is a basic “propensity in human nature.” To chasten, educate, and
moderate this basic instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious, and
familial structures, practices, and expectations. Liberalism stresses our liberation
from continuous time as a basic feature of our nature, and thus regards such
formative institutions, structures, and practices as obstacles to the achievement
of our untrammeled individuality. The disassembling of those cultural forms that
tutor our presentism and instruct us that a distinctive feature of our humanity is
our capacity to remember and to promise renders us at once free, and trapped by
“brutish indifference” to any time outside our eternal present.
Tocqueville perceived that this same “brutish indifference” would manifest
itself not only politically but economically as well. Dissolving the practices,
along with the structures, that draw people out of temporal narrowness, he
feared, would have the effect of separating people’s capacity to discern a shared
fate. Fractured time, and the resultant escape into the “solitude of our own
hearts,” would lead to self-congratulation and actual physical as well as psychic
separation of those who were economically successful from those less fortunate.
In effect, he predicted that a new aristocracy would arise, but that its “brutish
indifference” born of temporal fracturing would lead it to be worse than the
aristocracy it was replacing. “The territorial aristocracy of past ages was obliged
by law, or thought itself obliged by custom, to come to the help of its servants
and to relieve their distress. But the industrial aristocracy of our day, when it has
impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in their time of
crisis to public charity to feed them. . . . Between workman and master there are
frequent relations, but no true association.”8 The fracturing of time is embraced
as a form of freedom, a liberation especially of personal obligations we have to
those with whom we share a past, a future, and even—ultimately—the present
itself.
A better way to understand culture is as a kind of collective trust. Culture is
the practice of full temporality, an institution that connects the present to the past
and the future. As the Greeks understood, the mother of culture—of the Nine
Muses—was Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.” Culture educates us
about our generational debts and obligations. At its best, it is a tangible
inheritance of the past, one that each of us is obligated to regard with the
responsibilities of trusteeship. It is itself an education in the full dimension of
human temporality, meant to abridge our temptation to live within the present,
with the attendant dispositions of ingratitude and irresponsibility that such a
narrowing of temporality encourages. Preserved in discrete human inheritances
—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the
human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to
creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.
Solzhenitsyn cut to the heart of liberalism’s great failing and ultimate weakness:
its incapacity to foster self-governance.
It is fitting that Solzhenitsyn delivered this lecture at Harvard, the nation’s
premier university, since the elite universities are preeminent examples of what
were once institutions of cultural formation that have become purveyors of
liberal anticulture. Elite universities, and the educational system more broadly,
are the front lines in the advance of liberalism’s deliberate and wholesale
disassembly of a broad swath of cultural norms and practices in the name of
liberation from the past. Two areas in particular are served and undergirded by
the educational imperative to advance the contemporary anticulture: dissolutions
of sexual and economic norms, both advanced in the name of liberation of the
human will that is defined especially by consumption, hedonism, and short-term
thinking. The fact that each of liberalism’s two main parties—“liberals” and
“conservatives”—views one of these activities as problematic and the other at
the core of its commitments reflects the insidiousness and pervasiveness of
liberalism’s advance.
The universities are the front line of the sexual revolution, the high churches
charged with proselytizing the modern orthodoxy of individual liberation. As
Stephen Gardner has described the central dogma of the new creed, “Eros must
be raised to the level of religious cult in modern society. . . . It is in carnal desire
that the modern individual believes he affirms his ‘individuality.’ The body must
be the true ‘subject’ of desire because the individual must be the author of his
own desire.”20 The “subject” imagined in the “state of nature” is now the
resulting creature and creation of liberalism’s educational system, at once
claiming merely to respect the natural autonomy of individuals and actively
catechizing this “normless” norm.
One of the upheavals of the sexual revolution was the rejection of long-
standing rules and guidelines governing the behavior of students at the nation’s
colleges and universities. Formerly understood to stand in for parents—in loco
parentis, “in place of the parent”—these institutions dictated rules regarding
dormitory life, dating, curfews, visitations, and comportment. Adults—often
clergy—were charged with continuing the cultivation of youth into responsible
adulthood. Some fifty years after students were liberated from the nanny college,
we are seeing not a sexual nirvana but widespread confusion and anarchy, and a
new form of in absentia parentis—the paternalist state.
Long-standing local rules and cultures that governed behavior through
education and cultivation of norms, manners, and morals came to be regarded as
oppressive limitations on individual liberty. Those forms of control were lifted in
the name of liberation, leading to regularized abuse of those liberties, born
primarily of lack of any sets of practices or customs to delineate limits on
behavior, especially in the fraught arena of sexual interaction. The federal
government, seen as the only legitimate authority for redress, exercised its
powers to reregulate the liberated behaviors. But in the wake of disassembled
local cultures, there is no longer a set of norms by which to cultivate self-rule,
since these would constitute an unjust limitation upon our freedom. Now there
can be only punitive threats that occur after the fact. Most institutions have
gotten out of the business of seeking to educate the exercise of freedom through
cultivation of character and virtue; emphasis is instead placed upon the
likelihood of punishment after one body has harmed another body.
This immorality tale is the Hobbesian vision in microcosm: first, tradition
and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust (“natural man”). Then we
see that absent such norms, anarchy ensues (“the state of nature”). Finding this
anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that
“Mortall God” who will protect us from ourselves (“the social contract”). We
have been liberated from all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to
educate within the context of ongoing communities, and have replaced these
things with a distant authority that punishes us when we abuse our freedoms.
And now, lacking any informal and local forms of authority, we are virtually
assured that those abuses will regularly occur and that the state will find it
necessary to intrude ever more minutely into personal affairs (“Prerogative”).
We see an identical liberation of appetite in the economic realm, where
varying economic cultures are dismantled in the name of homogenous “laws” of
economics, disconnecting the pursuit of appetite from the common good, and
relying upon the unreliable enforcement of abstract and distant regulation of
markets, backstopped by the promise of punishment by the liberal state. Just as
the destruction of distinct campus cultures and their replacement by an
increasingly laissez-faire jungle with distant administrative oversight have given
rise to a “rape culture,” so too has “the market” replaced a world of distinctive
economic cultures. The near collapse of the world economy in 2008 was, above
all, the result of the elimination of a culture that existed to regulate and govern
the granting and procuring of mortgages. This activity was historically
understood as consummately local, requiring relationships that developed over
time and in place. Laws and norms once existed to shore up the local mortgage
culture, forbidding banks to open branches in communities outside those where
they were based, premised on a belief that the granting and accepting of debt
rested on trust and local knowledge. These laws, and the culture they supported,
presupposed that “the bankers’ interests and the interests of the larger
community are one and the same.”21 The mortgage market was thus understood
not as a naked arena of anonymous and abstract relations but as a form of
organized remembrance in which trust, reputation, memory, and obligation were
required for the market to operate. As J. P. Morgan chief Thomas Lamont said of
his business in 1928, “the community as a whole demands of the banker that he
shall be an honest observer of conditions about him, that he shall make constant
and careful study of those conditions, financial, economic, social and political,
and that he shall have a wide vision over them all.”22
By 2008, the financial industry was stripped bare of any such culture rooted
in nature, time and place—as were college campuses. Indeed, training at dorm
parties and the fraternities of one’s college were the ideal preparation for a career
in the mortgage bond market, and the financial frat party of Wall Street more
generally. The mortgage industry rested upon the financial equivalent of college
“hookups,” random encounters of strangers in which appetites (for outsized debt
or interest) were sated without any care for the consequences for the wider
community. Responsibility- and cost-free loans were mutually satisfactory and
wholly liberating from the constraints of an older financial order. But much as on
college campuses, these arrangements led to gross irresponsibility and abuse,
damaging communities and demolishing lives. The response has been the same:
calls for greater government regulation and oversight over the consequences of
untrammeled appetite, with threats of penalties (rarely enforced) and a massive
expansion of the administrative state to oversee a basic human interaction—the
effort to secure shelter. Liberation from the confinements and limitations of local
market cultures brings not perfect liberty but the expansion of Leviathan. The
destruction of culture achieves not liberation but powerlessness and bondage.
The dissolution of culture is simultaneously the prerequisite for the liberation
of the disembedded individual, for a pervasive and encompassing market, and
for the empowerment of the state. Individuals appeal to available authorities for
a loosening of cultural norms and practices in the name of individual liberation,
leading to various pressures that diminish or dissolve the constitutive features of
long-standing informal norms. Absent these norms, individuals pursue
liberalized liberty, fulfilling the desire to do as one wishes, all that is not
restrained by law or causing obvious harm. But without the guiding standards of
behavior that were generally developed through cultural practices and
expectations, liberated individuals inevitably come into conflict. The only
authority that can now adjudge those claims is the state, leading to an increase in
legal and political activity in local affairs that were once generally settled by
cultural norms. Liberal individualism demands the dismantling of culture; and as
culture fades, Leviathan waxes and responsible liberty recedes.
PARASITIC LIBERALISM
P
RAISE and misgivings about our technological nature have been with us for
millennia, but it is only in modern times—roughly since the dawn of the
industrial era—that we have entered what we might call a technological
age. While we have always been technological creatures, our reliance on
technology has distinctly changed, along with our attitude toward technology
and our relationship with it. One is hard-pressed to think of premodern works of
poetry, literature, or song that express society-wide infatuation with technology.
There are no great medieval works extolling the invention of the iron stirrup or
the horse collar. Our intellectual and emotional relationship to that technology—
both our wild optimism about the prospects of human progress and our profound
terror about the apocalypse this same technology might bring about—are
products of modern times.1
This oscillation between ecstasy and anxiety over technology’s role in our
lives has become one of the primary forms of self-expression and entertainment
in the modern age, at least since Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. In recent
years, the genre seems to have become even more pervasive, with an emphasis
not only on technology’s promise and threat but on its role in either preventing
or bringing about an apocalypse. My unscientific impression is that more
popular programming than ever is devoted to this theme. If our sense of threat
from nuclear weapons seems to have waned somewhat, we have found other
night terrors, from medical catastrophe to cyborg warfare on humanity to
cataclysmic climate change and the specter of human extinction.
Over the past few decades, several blockbuster films have depicted the
apocalypse as the result of uncontrollable forces that humans valiantly
combatted, often successfully. The threats include extinction by asteroid, as in
Armageddon and Deep Impact; alien invasion, as in Independence Day, War of
the Worlds, and Battle Los Angeles; and, in 2012, general demise coincident with
the end of the Mayan calendar. In all of these films, it is technology, in various
ways, that is the source of humanity’s eventual triumph over or salvation from
these threats.
But most recent entrants to the genre seem rather to focus on how our
technology is likely to be the source of our doom. Some recent films hark back
to fears of a nuclear apocalypse, such as The Book of Eli or The Road. Others
posit that we will end civilization through global warming, such as The Day after
Tomorrow. There are films about medical experiments going awry, leading to a
massive die-off, such as I Am Legend, Quarantine, Contagion, and Rise of the
Planet of the Apes. There are stories about our technology failing or attacking us,
such as the Terminator series and, more recently, the television show Revolution,
about a time when all machines cease to operate and electricity ceases to flow.
The successful HBO series Westworld depicts machines becoming more human
than a dehumanized humanity, intimating that we may have invented a better
version of ourselves. Similarly, the digital series H+ tells of a future in which
developments in nanotechnology lead to widespread implantation of tiny chips
into human beings, allowing them to discard cellphones, tablets, and computers
by becoming interconnected receivers of data, texts, and email. While the series
begins with triumphalist pronouncements by transhumanist techno-optimists, the
technology soon turns deadly, causing a massive die-off of millions who have
been implanted.
Most examples of this recent genre seems to reflect a widespread foreboding
about a shared sense of powerlessness, and even the potential for a new kind of
bondage to the very technology that is supposed to liberate us. These movies and
programs portray how, in our optimistic and even hubristic belief that our
technology will usher in a new age of freedom, we discover in various ways that
we are subjects to those very technologies. Far from controlling our technology
for our own betterment, we find that the technology ends up either ruling or
destroying us.
ANDROID HUMANITY
A host of academic studies and works also explore, if less dramatically, the ways
in which we are subjects to the transformative effects of our technologies. A
paramount example today may be found in anxious descriptions of how the
internet and social media are inescapably changing us, mainly for the worse.
Several recent books and studies describing the measurable baleful effects of
these technologies have found a ready audience well beyond the usual academic
circles. For instance, in his widely discussed book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr
describes how the internet is literally changing us, transforming our brains into
different organs from those of the preinternet world. Appealing to developments
in studies of brain plasticity, Carr describes how persistent occupation with the
internet is leading to physiological changes to our brains, and hence to the ways
we think, learn, and act. He argues that sustained exposure to the internet is
rewiring our synapses, making us intensely hungry for frequent changes in
images and content and less able than our forebears to concentrate and focus. For
Carr, this change is not altogether for the worse, since some areas of the brain
have shown measurable increases, particularly those related to decision making
and problem solving. But those gains are accompanied by significant losses in
language facility, memory, and concentration. We are, he argues, becoming more
shallow, not simply in a superficial way, but physiologically. The internet is
making us dumber.2
Other books emphasize the contributions of the internet and the social media
to changes in our social and relational lives, often for the worse. In her book
Alone Together MIT’s Sherry Turkle assembles evidence that our pervasive use
of modern social media doesn’t so much create new communities as it
substitutes for the real-world communities that it destroys. Turkle reminds us
that the root of the word “community” means literally “to give among each
other” and argues that such a practice requires “physical proximity” and “shared
responsibilities.” The growing presence of social media fosters relationships that
avoid either of these constitutive elements of community, replacing that thicker
set of shared practices with the thinner and more evanescent bonds of
“networks.” Turkle is not simply nostalgic—she acknowledges the difficult and
even awful aspects of community in earlier times. She describes the community
in which her grandparents lived, for instance, as “rife with deep antagonisms.”
But the same thickness that gave rise to such contentious relations, she writes,
also inspired people to take care of each other in times of need. Turkle fears that
we are losing not only that experience but also the capacity to form the thick
bonds that constitute community, and that our attraction to social media at once
undermines these bonds and provides a pale simulacrum to fill the void. Social
media become ersatz substitutes for what they destroy, and Turkle seems
pessimistic about the prospects for slowing this transformation. At best we can
try to limit our children’s access to the internet, but Turkle seems resigned to dim
prospects of fundamentally changing the current dynamic.3
These recent works follow in the tradition established by critics of
technology who emphasize the way that technology changes us and, in
particular, destroys long-standing ways of life, attacking the very basis of
culture. There is a long tradition of cultural criticism, ranging from Lewis
Mumford’s critiques of modernism to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society,
which emphasizes the way the “technique” of technology erases everything in its
path in the name of utility and efficiency, and more recently to Wendell Berry,
who has argued that machine technology has its own logic, which tends to
destroy the practices and traditions of a community. Perhaps the most
representative voice in this tradition is that of Neil Postman, whose book
Technopoly—published in 1992—was suggestively subtitled The Surrender of
Culture to Technology.
In that book, Postman describes the rise in the modern era of what he calls
Technocracy. Preindustrial forms of culture and social organization used tools no
less than technocratic societies, Postman writes, but the tools they employed
“did not attack (or more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and
integrity of the culture into which they were introduced. With some exceptions,
tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in
their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social
organization.”4 The tools adopted by a Technocracy, by contrast, constantly
transform the way of life. Postman writes, “Everything must give way, in some
degree, to their development. . . . Tools are not integrated into the culture; they
attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition,
social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”5
From technocracy we have entered the age of “technopoly,” in which a culturally
flattened world operates under an ideology of progress that leads to “the
submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and
technology.” The residual cultural practices that survived the era of technocracy
now give way to a transformed world in which technology is itself our culture—
or anticulture, a tradition-destroying and custom-undermining dynamic that
replaces cultural practices, memory, and beliefs.
What these critiques have in common is the supposition that our technology
is changing us, often for the worse. We are the subjects of its activity and largely
powerless before its transformative power. Our anxiety arises from the belief that
we may no longer control the technology that is supposed to be a main tool of
our liberty.
Perhaps an even deeper anxiety arises from the belief that there is an
inevitability to technological advances that no amount of warning about their
dangers can prevent. A kind of Hegelian or Darwinian narrative seems to
dominate our worldview. We seem inescapably to be either creating our own
destroyer or, as Lee Silver writes in Remaking Eden, evolving into a
fundamentally different creature that we have reason to fear becoming. Our
popular culture seems to be a kind of electronic Cassandra, seeing the future but
unable to get anyone to believe it. The culture offers entertaining prophecies
born of our anxieties, and we take perverse pleasure distracting ourselves with
portrayals of our powerlessness.
One example of this genre of technological (as well as political) inevitability,
albeit framed in a triumphalist mode, is the narrative advanced by Francis
Fukuyama in his famous essay, and later book, The End of History. The book, in
particular, provides a long materialist explanation of the inescapable scientific
logic, driven by the need for constant advances in military technology,
contributing to the ultimate rise of the liberal state. Only the liberal state, in
Fukuyama’s view, could provide the environment for the open scientific inquiry
that has led to the greatest advances in military devices and tactics. All others are
inexorably forced to follow. Yet, in a book written only a decade later on
advances in biotechnology and “our posthuman future,” Fukuyama
acknowledges that this very logic might end up altering human nature itself, and
as a result imperiling the political order of liberal democracy it had been
developed to support.6
Other works speak of technological inevitability as a result of forces
embedded within the nature of reality itself. In his now-classic 1967 essay “Do
Machines Make History?” the economic historian Robert Heilbroner depicts a
logic within the development of history that pushed humans toward
technological development. While societies might adopt those technologies at
different speeds, nevertheless there is a form of “soft determinism” in
technological development. Perhaps more forthright still is the argument found
in Daniel J. Boorstin’s short book The Republic of Technology, published in
1978, in which he depicts technological development as following a kind of
“Law” like that of gravity or thermodynamics. For example, “the Supreme Law
of the Republic of Technology is convergence, the tendency for everything to
become more like everything else.”7 The laws governing technological
development thus inevitably shape our human world in an increasingly identical
form—anticipating today’s suspicions that modern technology’s child,
“globalization,” is a kind of inescapable unfolding.
Whether told as praise or lament, this narrative of inevitability tends to grant
autonomy to technology itself, as if its advances occurred independently of
human intention and thought. It becomes a process inescapably driven by its
own internal logic—or, to modify a phrase of Hegel’s, “the cunning of techne,”
the unconscious unfolding of a technological Geist that leads inevitably to
convergence and singularity, a fully technologized culmination of History with a
capital H. It, too, perhaps has a slaughterbench that demands its share of victims
in the course of its unfolding, but their sacrifice is justified by Progress to a
better and even perfected future.
I want to challenge, or at least complicate, these two related ways that
modern humans have come to discern and portray technology—as something
that shapes and even remakes us, and does so with a kind of iron law of
inevitability. Doing so requires me to take a step back into an exploration of
what Aristotle called “the master science” of all sciences—political philosophy
—and try to discern the deeper origins of humanity’s new relationship to
technology.
B
EFORE the advent of liberalism, culture was the most pervasive human
technology and the fundamental locus of education. It was the
comprehensive shaping force of the person who took part in, and would
in turn pass on, the deepest commitments of a civilization. As the word itself
intimates, a culture cultivates; it is the soil in which the human person grows and
—if it is a good culture—flourishes.
But if liberalism ultimately replaces all forms of culture with a pervasive
anticulture, then it must undermine education as well. In particular, it must
undermine liberal education, the education that was understood as the main
means of educating free persons by means of deep engagement with the fruits of
long cultural inheritance, particularly the great texts of antiquity and the long
Christian tradition. To the extent that a fully realized liberalism undermines
culture and cultivation into liberty as a form of self-governance, an education for
a free people is displaced by an education that makes liberal individuals servants
to the end of untutored appetite, restlessness, and technical mastery of the natural
world. Liberal education is replaced with servile education.
Liberalism undermines liberal education in the first instance by detaching the
educational enterprise itself from culture and making it an engine of anticulture.
Education must be insulated from the shaping force of culture as the exercise of
living within nature and a tradition, instead stripped bare of any cultural
specificity in the name of a cultureless multiculturalism, an environmentalism
barren of a formative encounter with nature, and a monolithic and homogenous
“diversity.” Its claims to further multiculturalism only distract from its pervasive
anticultural and homogenizing impetus.
Liberalism further undermines education by replacing a definition of liberty
as an education in self-government with liberty as autonomy and the absence of
constraint. Ultimately it destroys liberal education, since it begins with the
assumption that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to become free.
Under liberalism, the liberal arts are instruments of personal liberation, an end
that is consistently pursued in the humanities, in the scientific and mathematical
disciplines (STEM), and in economics and business. In the humanities,
liberatory movements based on claims of identity regard the past as a repository
of oppression, and hence displace the legitimacy of the humanities as a source of
education. Meanwhile, the subjects that advance the practical and effectual
experience of autonomy—STEM, economics, and business—come to be
regarded as the sole subjects of justified study. The classical understanding of
liberal arts as aimed at educating the free human being is displaced by emphasis
upon the arts of the private person. An education fitting for a res publica is
replaced with an education suited for a res idiotica—in the Greek, a “private”
and isolated person. The purported difference between left and right disappears
as both concur that the sole legitimate end of education is the advance of power
through the displacement of the liberal arts.
Yet while contemporary emphases in the humanities are consistent with the
aspiration for autonomy that underlies the modern scientific venture, this
conformity has not lent the humanities much long-term viability. In the absence
of strongly articulated grounds for studying the liberal arts, in distinction to the
modern project of autonomy and mastery, students and administrators are voting
with their feet and pocketbooks to support the areas that show more promise for
mastering nature. It is a sign of the success of the vision of autonomy advanced
by the main players in today’s humanities that their disciplines are shrinking and
even disappearing, while STEM and economic pursuits grow. In the absence of a
persuasive counternarrative, students, parents, and administrators understand that
the best route to achieving the liberal conception of freedom is not in the
humanities but elsewhere.
Today the liberal arts have exceedingly few defenders. The children of the
left cultural warriors of the 1980s are no longer concerned with a more
representative and inclusive canon. They are more interested in advancing the
cause of egalitarian autonomy, now arrayed against the older liberal norms of
academic freedom and free speech in the name of what some call “academic
justice” and greater campus representation. While a rallying point is the cry for
greater diversity, the ongoing project of “diversification” in fact creates greater
ideological homogeneity on nearly every campus. Under the guise of differences
in race, an exploding number of genders, and a variety of sexual orientations, the
only substantive worldview advanced is that of advanced liberalism: the ascent
of the autonomous individual backed by the power and support of the state and
its growing control over institutions, including schools and universities.
The children of the right’s cultural warriors have also largely abandoned
interest in the role of formative books as the central contribution for cultivating
self-government. Instead, today’s “conservatives” are more likely to dismiss the
role of the liberal arts not only as a lost cause, but not even worth the fight
anymore.9 Instead, reflecting priorities of the modern marketplace, they are more
inclined to call for greater emphasis on STEM and economic fields—those fields
that have gained prominence because of the victory of ideas in many of the
“Great Books” that successfully proposed that old books might no longer be
studied. Conservative political leaders like Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin
or Senator Marco Rubio of Florida disdain the liberal arts for not leading to
high-paying jobs—and find unexpected support from President Obama, who
criticized art history on the same grounds.
An education based in a set of cultural conditions takes its lead from nature and
works alongside it, through such practices as agriculture, craftsmanship,
worship, story, memory, and tradition. It does not, in the model of the new
science, seek nature’s dominion or capitulation. A fundamental responsibility of
education, then, is the transmission of culture—not its rejection or
transcendence. A proper regard for and transmission of culture seeks to prevent
the willful and aggressive exploitation of nature and Gnostic condescension
toward culture, just as it cautions against the sort of roving and placeless form of
deracinated philosophy of the sort recommended by an education in “critical
thinking” and implicitly commended by our encouragement of our students to
define success only by achieving a condition of placeless itinerancy demanded
by our global economic system.
Finally, understood as a training in limits and care for the world and
particular places and people, a liberal education—properly understood—is not
merely a form of liberation from “the ancestral” or nature but an education in the
limits that each imposes upon us necessarily to live in ways that do not tempt us
to Promethean forms of individual or generational self-aggrandizement or the
abusive effort to liberate ourselves from the limits and sanctions of nature.
Particularly in an age during which we are becoming all too familiar with the
consequences of living solely in and for the present and disconnected from
“ancestral” concerns for living within our means—whether financially or
environmentally—we would be well served to move beyond the extreme
presentism of the contemporary era. We should instead seek a reinvigoration of
an idea of liberal education in which we understand liberty to be the condition in
which we come to terms with, and accept, the limits and constraints that nature
and culture rightfully exert. As commended by ancient and religious traditions
alike, liberty is not liberation from constraint but rather our capacity to govern
appetite and thus achieve a truer form of liberty—liberty from enslavement to
our appetites and avoidance of depletion of the world. In short, needful is the
rescue of liberal education from liberalism.
CHAPTER SIX
W
HILE both sides in our current anticulture wars advance the liberal
project of statist and market deracination and liberationism, achieved
through expansion of individual autonomy and the Baconian project
of conquering nature, students are wholly shaped to be working pieces within
this system of “liberation.” Increasingly today’s students enter college solely
with an aim to its “practical” application, by which is meant its direct relevance
to its economic and technical applications, wholly unaware that there is a more
capacious way of understanding “practical” to include how one lives as a spouse,
parent, neighbor, citizen, and human being.
A two-tier system has arisen in which elite students are culled from every
corner of the globe so that they may prepare for lives of deracinated
vagabondage, majoring only in what Wendell Berry calls “upward mobility.”
Elite universities engage in the educational equivalent of strip mining:
identifying economically viable raw materials in every city, town, and hamlet,
they strip off that valuable commodity, process it in a distant location, and render
the products economically useful for productivity elsewhere. The places that
supplied the raw materials are left much like depressed coal towns whose
mineral wealth has been long since mined and exported. Such students embrace
“identity” politics and “diversity” to serve their economic interests, perpetual
“potentiality” and permanent placelessness. The identities and diversity thus
secured are globally homogenous, the precondition for a fungible global elite
who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and
placeless world defined above all by liberal norms of globalized indifference
toward shared fates of actual neighbors and communities. This in turn induces
the globalized irresponsibility that was reflected in the economic interactions
that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis but which is assuaged by calls for
“social justice,” generally to be handled through the depersonalized levers of the
state. One of the most powerful ways that liberalism advances is by implicitly
encouraging globalized narcissism while perpetuating a pervasive belief in its
own benevolence.
Those who remain in the hamlets, towns, and cities are generally condemned
to straitened economic circumstances, destined for low-wage and stagnant
service industry jobs and cut off from the top tier of analytic-conceptual work
that is reserved for elite graduates. They are rooted in economically deprived
regions or survive on the outskirts of concentrations of elites, where they will
struggle with inflated real estate prices either by overpopulating subpar urban
housing or by living at a great commuting distance from work and
entertainment. They generally own extraordinary and growing levels of debt,
mainly college loans and mortgage debt, though the insistent demand that they
participate fully in the broader economy as consumers doubtless leads them to
accumulate other excessive debts as well. While there is always the chance that
one of their children might move up the economic ladder—particularly via an
elite college—in the main, fairly static differentiation now persists between the
classes.
The fact that there can be both upward and downward movement, however,
and that competition has now been globalized, leads all classes to share a
pervasive anxiety. Because social status is largely a function of position, income,
and geographic location, it is always comparative and insecure. While advancing
liberalism assures that individuals are more free than ever from accidents of
birth, race, gender, and location, today’s students are almost universally in the
thrall of an economic zero-sum game. Accusations of careerism and a focus on
résumé building are not the result of a failure of contemporary education but
reflect the deepest lessons students have imbibed from the earliest age: that
today’s society produces economic winners and losers, and that one’s
educational credentials are almost the sole determinant of one’s eventual status.
Today’s students, in bondage to what the ancients would have called “servile
education,” generally avoid a liberal education, having been discouraged from it
by their parents and by society at large. Liberalism spells the demise of an
education once thought fitting for free people.
A main lesson learned particularly at elite colleges is the set of cooperative
skills needed to ensure competitive advantage over those who are not in the elite,
while recognizing that even those cooperative relationships are conditioned by a
competitive system. Friendships and even romantic relationships are like
international alliances—understood to serve personal advantage. In his book
Coming Apart, Charles Murray reports that while stable marriages are more
likely to contribute to various measures of life success, those most likely to form
stable lifelong marriages are those at the elite levels of the social ladder.1 Those
in the lower tiers, meanwhile, are experiencing catastrophic levels of familial
and social breakdown, making it all but impossible for them or their children to
move into the upper tier. Elites are studiously silent about the familial basis of
their relative success. Marital stability is now a form of competitive advantage
for the upper tier, an advantage amplified by the insistence that family formation
is a matter of individual choice and even an obstacle to autonomy. Having
shaped the family in the image of the Hobbesian state of nature, its adoption by
the strong is now one more tool for advantage over the weak.
The educational system, transformed into a tool of liberalism, is also
ultimately the systemic creation of a new aristocracy of the strong over the weak.
Liberalism’s denouement is a society of deep, pervasive stratification, a
condition that liberals lament even as they contribute in manifold ways to its
perpetuation—particularly through its educational institutions. Liberalism’s
success thus fosters the conditions of its failure: having claimed to bring about
the downfall of aristocratic rule of the strong over the weak, it culminates in a
new, more powerful, even more permanent aristocracy that fights ceaselessly to
maintain the structures of liberal injustice.
With this passage, Locke admits that the new economic, social, and political
arrangements will bring about pervasive inequality, but suggests that it is to be
preferred to an inequality in which the “querulous and contentious” govern,
since everyone will be in a better material position. Inequality can be made
bearable by the increased wealth that will be enjoyed as well by lower-status
citizens. But Locke also tells us that inequality under the new system has the
potential for nearly limitless differentiation. A subsistence economy is
noteworthy for almost complete material equality between ruler and ruled. The
aristocratic order is marked by pervasive inequality of rank and status, but those
differences are relatively immovable. The proposed liberal order, by contrast, is
premised on an elastic and expansive condition of inequality based upon
economic prosperity as the method of differentiation between the higher and
lower orders. The means of assuaging indignities, slights, resentment, or anger at
the widening gap between high and low, successful and ineffective, rulers and
ruled, is the promise of ever-increasing material prosperity for every member of
society.
This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal
and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be
achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full
acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity
along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility.
Today’s classical liberals continue to advance this settlement as not only
acceptable but worthy of celebration. Centuries after Locke, John F. Kennedy
summarized this wager with the promise that “a rising tide raises all boats”—
echoed often by Ronald Reagan—suggesting that even the flimsiest and cheapest
boat could benefit from tsunami-sized differences for those at the top and the
bottom. A vital element of this prosperity was the aggressive conquest of nature,
particularly the intensive extraction of every potentially useful resource as well
as the invention of processes and methods that would increase immediate value,
regardless of future costs and consequences. Locke’s thesis was that ongoing and
continuous growth of wealth and prosperity could function as a replacement for
social cohesion and solidarity. As the libertarian Friedrich Hayek understood, a
society that embraces “rapid economic advance” will necessarily encourage
inequality: “Progress at such a fast rate cannot proceed on a uniform front but
must take place in echelon fashion.”3 Echoing Locke, Hayek recognizes that a
society that advances rapidly and generates significant economic inequality will
necessarily rely upon rapid and even accelerating advances in order to assuage
discontent: “The enjoyment of personal success will be given to large numbers
only in a society that, as a whole, progresses fairly rapidly. In a stationary society
there will be about as many descending as there will be those rising. In order that
the great majority should in their individual lives participate in the advance, it is
necessary that it proceed at considerable speed.”4
Hayek acknowledges that the liberal society will generate as much inequality
as the order it replaced, or even more, but the promise of constant change and
progress will ensure that everyone supports the liberal system. He is confident
that even potentially titanic inequality—far outstripping the differences between
peasant and king—will nevertheless lead to nearly universal endorsement of
such a political and economic system.
There are now growing doubts over whether the promise of growth can be
perpetuated. Humanity has confronted both the limits imposed by nature, as the
costs of two centuries’ economic growth become increasingly evident in today’s
accelerating climate change, and the decreasing likelihood that market capitalism
will generate increasing prosperity for every part of society. Recent years have
proven the foresight of Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, that an iron
logic within market capitalism—namely the perpetual effort to suppress wages
either by finding new low-wage markets or replacing humans with machines or
computers—will increasingly reduce all but a few forms of work to drudgery
and indignity. This recognition has led to a return of Locke’s basic wager that a
system that provided material comfort, no matter the vastness of inequality and
absent likely prospects of growth and mobility between classes, would
nevertheless satisfy most members of society. The most recent muse of Lockean
liberalism is the economist Tyler Cowen, whose book Average Is Over echoes
the basic contours of Locke’s argument. While noting that liberalism and market
capitalism perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that might have
made dukes and earls of old blush, Cowen argues that we are at the end of a
unique period in American history, a time of widespread belief in relative
equality and shared civic fate, and entering an age in which we will effectively
see the creation of two separate nations. Yet in his concluding chapter, fittingly
entitled “A New Social Contract?,” Cowen nevertheless concludes that
liberalism will continue to enjoy widespread support:
We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living
to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I
imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has
fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit
with better health care. . . .
This framing of income inequality in meritocratic terms will prove self-reinforcing. Worthy
individuals will in fact rise from poverty on a regular basis, and that will make it easier to ignore
those who are left behind.5
Cowen predicts that this low-wage majority will settle in places that look a lot
like Texas: cheap housing, some job creation, and subpar government services.
Political leaders, he suggests, should consider erecting entire cityscapes of
favelas with low rent and free internet, thus offering a virtual world of
distraction from the grim poverty and spiritual desiccation that will become a
permanent way of life for most citizens. Far from predicting that this dystopia
will bring the end of liberalism and precipitate revolution against a social and
economic system that re-creates the conditions of the old aristocracy that
liberalism was supposed to overthrow, Cowen ends his book on this hopeful
note: “We might even look ahead to a time when the cheap or free fun is so
plentiful that it will feel a bit like Karl Marx’s communist utopia, albeit brought
on by capitalism. That is the real light at the end of the tunnel.”6
Mill feared the tyranny of public opinion, expressed through custom, but
Burke argued that the tyrannical impulse was far more likely found among the
“innovators” and might be restrained by prejudice. It was the unshackled
powerful who were to be feared, not the custom-following ordinary citizens.
Burke saw a close relationship between the revolutionary and tyrannical
impulse, made particularly insidious when the Great could claim the mantle of
popular legitimacy: “The spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish
temper. . . . When they are not on their guard, [the democratists] treat the
humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst at the same
time, they pretend to make them the depositories of their power.”13
Society today has been organized around the Millian principle that
“everything is allowed,” at least so long as it does not result in measurable
(mainly physical) harm. It is a society organized for the benefit of the strong, as
Mill recognized. By contrast, a Burkean society is organized for the benefit of
the ordinary—the majority who benefit from societal norms that the strong and
the ordinary alike are expected to follow. A society can be shaped for the benefit
of most people by emphasizing mainly informal norms and customs that secure
the path to flourishing for most human beings; or it can be shaped for the benefit
of the extraordinary and powerful by liberating all from the constraint of custom.
Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary;
today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong.
LIBERALOCRACY ASCENDANT
T
HE term “liberal democracy” is widely used to describe the regime that
today is regarded by most in the West as the sole legitimate form of
political organization. “Liberalism” thus adjectivally coexists with the
noun “democracy,” apparently giving pride of place to the more ancient regime
form in which the people rule. However, the oft-used phrase achieves something
rather different from its apparent meaning: the adjective not only modifies
“democracy” but proposes a redefinition of the ancient regime into its effective
opposite, to one in which the people do not rule but are instead satisfied with the
material and martial benefits of living in a liberal res idiotica. At the same time,
the word “democracy” affords legitimation to the liberal regime from a populace
whose purported consent stands in for a more robust form of citizenship. A
degraded form of citizenship arises from liberalism’s relentless emphasis upon
private over public things, self-interest over civic spirit, and aggregation of
individual opinion over common good.
We live in an age in which the ancient suspicion of democracy as a debased
and corrupt form of government has been largely forgotten, or when
encountered, is regarded as backward, authoritarian, and inhuman. The genius of
liberalism was to claim legitimacy on the basis of consent and arrange periodic
managed elections, while instituting structures that would dissipate democratic
energies, encourage the creation of a fractured and fragmented public, and
ensure government by select elite actors. If this were all that liberalism achieved,
however, its patina of legitimation would quickly wear thin as a frustrated
populace witnessed a growing divide between the claims of democracy and the
absence of popular control. Instead, the true genius of liberalism was subtly but
persistently to shape and educate the citizenry to equate “democracy” with the
ideal of self-made and self-making individuals—expressive individualism—
while accepting the patina of political democracy shrouding a powerful and
distant government whose deeper legitimacy arises from enlarging the
opportunities and experience of expressive individualism. As long as liberal
democracy expands “the empire of liberty,” mainly in the form of expansive
rights, power, and wealth, the actual absence of active democratic self-rule is not
only an acceptable but a desired end. Thus liberalism abandons the pervasive
challenge of democracy as a regime requiring the cultivation of disciplined self-
rule in favor of viewing the government as a separate if beneficent entity that
supports limitless provision of material goods and untrammeled expansion of
private identity.
ANTIDEMOCRATIC LIBERALISM
Liberalism’s defenders are wont to note the dangers of democracy, particularly
the threat of unconstrained majorities over the liberties of minorities. Prominent
political observers such as Fareed Zakaria have noted the rise of “illiberal
democracy” as a main threat to political stability, rights, and liberal political
economy.1 In the wake of the rise of nationalist populist movements such as
those throughout Europe that oppose fundamental tenets of the European Union
—particularly focused on the effectual elimination of national boundaries—and
in the wake of Great Britain’s “Brexit” vote and the election of Donald J. Trump
to the U.S. presidency, political theorist and Wall Street Journal columnist
William Galston devoted a column warning that “the most urgent threat to liberal
democracy is not autocracy; it is illiberal democracy.”2 In the eyes of leading
commentators, democracy remains as threatening and unsavory a regime as it
did for Plato and Aristotle. While the ancient philosophers typically relegated
democracy to the category of “vicious” or “debased” regimes, today’s leading
thinkers retain a notional allegiance to democracy only by constraining it within
the strictures of liberalism, arguing that liberalism limits the power of the
majority and protects freedoms of speech and the press, constitutional checks
upon government. They also generally tend to favor fairly open markets and
porous national borders, arguing that these arrangements secure prosperity for
the nation’s consumers while allowing globalized opportunities of economic
mobility and opportunity.
Democracy is thus an acceptable legitimating tool only as long as its
practices exist within, and are broadly supportive of, liberal assumptions. When
democratic majorities reject aspects of liberalism—as electorates throughout
western Europe and America have done in recent years—a growing chorus of
leading voices denounce democracy and the unwisdom of the masses. American
elites have periodically assayed the possibility of severely limiting democracy,
believing that democracy will undermine policies preferred by experts. In
particular, those favoring the expansion of liberalism beyond the nation-state,
and thus policies that increase economic integration and the effective erasure of
borders, have increasingly become proponents of further constraining
democracy. One such authority is Jason Brennan of Georgetown University, who
has argued in a book entitled Against Democracy that voters are consistently ill-
informed and even ignorant, and that democratic government thus will
ultimately reflect the deficiencies of the electorate.3 Other libertarian-leaning
liberals such as Bryan Caplan, Jeffrey Friedman, and Damon Root believe that
when democracy threatens the substantive commitments of liberalism—which
they maintain will be unavoidably the case, since uneducated and uninformed
voters are illiberal—it might be better simply to consider ways to jettison
democracy.4 Brennan has instead called for rule by an “epistocracy,” a governing
elite with tested and proven knowledge to efficiently and effectively govern a
modern liberal and capitalist state and social order.
The positions of these contemporary liberals are hardly new; they echo
arguments made by other leading academics during the early part of the
twentieth century, when there was growing confidence in the expertise of the
administrative state and a dim view of the intellectual capacities of the
electorate. In his 1973 book The Crisis of Democratic Theory, Edward A. Purcell
masterfully documented the crisis of democratic theory that occurred as a result
of early findings in the social sciences. A considerable quantity of early social-
scientific data—including the first large-scale intelligence tests administered to a
population that was seen as representative of, or even superior to, the average
citizen, namely large numbers of troops during World War I—revealed
consistently low I.Q. scores among broad swaths of the American populace. A
steady stream of similar evidence led a great many leading social scientists of
the 1920s and 1930s to call for a wholesale change in government.5
No less a figure than the 1934 president of the American Political Science
Association—Walter J. Shepard—called for a fundamental reconsideration of
America’s traditional “faith” in democracy. The best evidence showed that the
people were guided not by knowledge and wisdom but by ignorance and whim:
“Not the reason alone, but sentiment, caprice, and passion are large elements in
the composition of public opinion. . . . We no longer believe that the ‘voice of
the people is the voice of God.’”6 Concluding that democracy was indefensible
—for reasons similar to those suggested by Brennan, Caplan, Friedman, and
others—Shepard urged his fellow political scientists to disabuse themselves of
their unjustified faith in the public: the electorate “must lose the halo which has
surrounded it. . . . The dogma of universal suffrage must give way to a system of
educational and other tests which will exclude the ignorant, the uninformed, and
the anti-social elements which hitherto have so frequently controlled elections.”7
Even John Dewey, who had once declared his own “democratic faith,” in a long
debate with Walter Lippmann acknowledged that the public was unlikely to be
able to rise to the level of civic knowledge and competence demanded in a
period of ever more complexity, and suggested that Whitman-like poets would
be needed to provide a suitable and accessible “presentation” of the complex
political and scientific information needed by the citizenry of a complex modern
society.8
Concern over “democratic competence” of ordinary citizens has given rise
not only to explicit critiques of democracy but to efforts to constrain democratic
rule even by those who otherwise claim the democratic mantle. By one measure,
progressive liberals appear strenuously to endorse democracy, and have been
responsible for introducing many measures that increase more direct forms of
democratic governance. Belief in greater direct popular control—evinced in such
proposals as the initiative, recall, and referendum—were evidence of Progressive
Era belief in the wisdom of the multitudes. Calls for education—with Dewey in
the lead—were accompanied by claims that “the true Kingdom of God” was on
the verge of realization.9
However, at the same time, a seemingly contradictory urge was evinced by
many of the same progressives. Accompanying calls for more democracy were
concomitant calls for less popular influence over policy making. Progressives
were behind movements for more professionalization in government, above all
civil service reform, with accompanying examinations and reduction in the
numbers of political appointees within administrations (thereby severing the
very electoral connection that progressives elsewhere sought to maximize).
Progressives were the great proponents of a growth in government bureaucracy
—the professionalization of politics—and the “science” of administration.
Progressives were also in the vanguard of the promotion of the social sciences—
including especially political science—as the best and most objective means of
determining and implementing rational and objectively sound public policy in
preference to the passing whims of the electorate. Major figures in the discipline
like Woodrow Wilson sought to advance the scientific study of politics in the
early years of the twentieth century, laying the groundwork for the rise of social
scientific methodology as the necessary replacement of value-laden policy. Early
figures in the institution of political science—such as Charles E. Merriam,
Harold D. Lasswell, and George E. G. Catlin—called for the scientific study of
politics as the prerequisite for objective public policy. “Nothing is more liable to
lead astray,” wrote A. Gordon Dewey of Columbia University, “than the
injection of moral considerations into essentially non-moral, factual
investigation.”10 Popular opinion was understood to give direction to those
charged with policy creation. Democracy was thus limited to the expression of
preferences, the collection of individual opinions that could then be collated and
inform expert crafting of appropriate policy by expert administrators. Elton
Mayo—a major social scientist in the 1920s—declared, “A world over, we are
greatly in need of an administrative elite.”11 Armed with objective data from the
social scientists, a credentialed, bureaucratic elite was expected to take cues
from, and at times to lead and direct, irrational and ignorant democratic masses
to accept objectively good public policy.
FOUNDING CONSTRAINTS
Consistent findings of civic ignorance and incompetence, indifference and
misinformation are held by yesterday’s and today’s social scientists to be like the
molecular makeup of water or laws of physics: measures of an objective and
largely unalterable reality. Ironically, in an age in which science is interested in
the ways that human activity is altering some basic assumptions about the
natural world—especially climate change—a basic assumption of social science
is that measurements of political “competence” are reflections of given facts. A
deeper commitment to liberal ends renders such social scientists insensate to the
ways that liberalism itself has fostered just such a “citizenry,” that its main aim
was to shape a liberal populace shaped primarily by individual interest and
commitments to private ends. Whether social scientists conclude from
measurements of civic ignorance and indifference that democracy should be
jettisoned or that efforts at “civic education” should be increased, the basic
assumption is the same: liberalism can correct what most contemporary liberals
can’t recognize that liberalism itself created. The ignorance of its own history
and aims—the “presentism” of liberals—is one of liberalism’s greatest defenses
against recognition that it generates a civic catastrophe that it then claims it must
cure by the application of more liberalism.
The persistent absence of civic literacy, voting, and public spiritedness is not
an accidental ill that liberalism can cure; it is the outcome of liberalism’s
unparalleled success. It is an aim that was built into the “operating system” of
liberalism, and the findings of widespread civic indifference and political
illiteracy of past and present social scientists are the expected consequences of a
successful liberal order.
For all of the differences between the progressives and the Framers, there
nevertheless exists this striking continuity, at base a shared commitment of their
common liberalism: both classical and progressive liberals are dominated by
thinkers who praise the rule of the electorate even as they seek to promote
systemic governmental features that will minimize electoral influence in the
name of good policy outcomes. Indeed, it is curious and perhaps erroneous to
debate the “democratic competence” of the American public, given that the
system of government explicitly designed by its Framers was not to be
democratic. The authors and defenders of the Constitution argued on behalf of
the basic law by explicitly rejecting the notion that the Constitution would result
in a democracy. They sought to establish a republic, not a democracy. As
Madison famously wrote in Federalist 10, “hence it is that democracies have
ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found
incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general
been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic
politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously
supposed that by reducing mankind to perfect equality in their political rights,
they would at the same time be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their
possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”12
Madison argued in particular that the dangers of democracies—conceived as
small-scale direct democracies (in his mind, roughly corresponding to the size of
the smallest American states) with a high level of participation by the citizenry
—could be avoided by two recourses: first, by “the representative principle” of
the new science of politics; and second, by “extending the sphere,” that is,
creating a large-scale political entity that would minimize the possibilities for
civic combination (“faction”), increase the numbers of interests, and discourage
political trust and activity among the citizenry. Even while retaining an electoral
connection that would lodge ultimate sovereignty in the people, Madison was
clear that representatives should not be excessively guided by the will of the
people: the desired effect of representation, he argued, is “to refine and enlarge
the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of
citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.”13
The best interest of the nation, according to James Madison in Federalist 10,
was defense of “the first object of government,” which was protection of
“diversity in the faculties of men.” The public realm existed for the sake of
differentiation of the individual from others. In Madison’s eighteenth-century
view, government existed to “protect” individual pursuits and the outcomes of
those pursuits, particularly as those individual differences would be manifest in
unequal and varied attainments of property. Government exists to protect the
greatest possible sphere of individual liberty, and does so by encouraging the
pursuit of self-interest among both the citizenry and public servants. That
“ambition must be made to counteract ambition” is conceived as the way by
which separated and divided powers will prevent any particular person from
centralizing and seizing power; but at the same time, the government itself is to
be given substantial new powers to act directly on individuals in order at once to
liberate them from the constraints of their particular localities, as well as to
promote especially expansion of commerce as well as the “useful arts and
sciences.”
This political technology of liberalism aimed to liberate individuals from
partial loyalties to particular people and places, and rather make us into
individuals who, above all, would strive to achieve our own individual ambitions
and desires. Part of the new technology of modern republicanism is what
Madison called the “enlarged orbit,” which not only would give rise to political
leaders of “fit character” but would inculcate civic indifference and privatism
among the citizenry. Madison hoped one consequence of enlarging the orbit
would be heightened levels of mutual distrust among a citizenry inclined to
advance particular interests, rendering them less likely to combine and
communicate: “Where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable
purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the
number whose concurrence is necessary.” A portrait arises of citizens who each
face a large mass of fellow citizens whom they are inclined to mistrust, and a
class of representatives who—while elected by the citizenry—take it upon
themselves to govern on the basis of their views of the best interest of the nation.
It was Madison’s hope that once the populace recognized its relative
powerlessness in the public realm, the people would instead focus their attention
on achievable private aims and ends. The political realm would attract the
ambitious and those drawn to power, but would direct the growing power of the
central government to increase individual prospects for the private ambitions of
the individual, encouraging at the same time liberation from interpersonal ties
and connections, fostering mistrust toward others so that interpersonal relations
would be tenuous, fleeting, and fungible. One of the ways that it was hoped that
modern republicanism would combat the ancient problem of political faction
was not by commending public spiritedness but rather by fostering a “mistrust of
motives” that would come about due to the large expanse of the republic,
constantly changing political dynamics, the encouragement to “pluralism” and
expansion of diversity as a default preference, and thus the shifting commitments
of the citizenry. The ancient commendation of virtue and aspiration to the
common good was to be replaced by the basic motivation of modern
republicanism—the pursuit of self-interest that leads to the overall increase of
power and thus fulfillment of desires.
The resulting liberal polity thus fosters a liberal society—one that commends
self-interest, the unleashed ambition of individuals, an emphasis on private
pursuits over a concern for public weal, and an acquired ability to maintain
psychic distance from any other human, including to reconsider any
relationships that constitute a fundamental limitation on our personal liberty. If
Madison largely believed that this expression of individual differentiation would
be manifest mainly through property, we can easily discern how this “external”
form of differentiation was eventually “internalized” to forms of personal
identity that would similarly require an active and expansive government to
“protect the diverse faculties of men”—or whatever identity one might wish to
assume. The idolization of “diversity” in the form of personal identity was sewn
into the deepest fabric of the liberal project, and with it the diminution of a
common civic and fostering of a common weal. The only common allegiance
that would remain was to a political project that supported ever more
individuation, fragmentation, and expansion of “diversity of faculties.”
The very origins of mass democracy, then, appear to be bound up with efforts to
minimize the creation of an engaged democratic citizenry. The dominant
American political narrative—consistent from the time of the Founding to the
Progressive Era and even to the present day—was simultaneously one that
valorized democratic governance while devising structures that insulated
government from excessive popular influence. More recent examples of the
diminution of popular input and control over governance include the rise of
“blue-ribbon commissions” and the growing influence of quasi-governmental
but largely insulated agencies like the Federal Reserve.
Classical and progressive liberals shared not only the ambition of
constraining democratic practice and active citizenship but a substantive vision
of what constituted “good policy.” Good policy for the Founders and
progressives alike were those that promoted the economic and political strength
of the American republic and the attendant expansion of power in its private and
public forms. Liberalism sought not the taming and disciplining of power, along
with the cultivation of attendant public and private virtues like frugality and
temperance, but institutional forms of harnessing power toward the ends of
national might, energy, and dynamism. As Publius—the pseudonym chosen by
Federalist authors Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—explains in
defending the Constitution’s bestowal of flexible powers upon the central
government, unforeseeable future circumstances, particularly in the realm of
foreign affairs, require the potential for the central government to wield
incalculable, hence unlimited, power. “There ought to be a CAPACITY,” writes
Hamilton in Federalist 34, “to provide for future contingencies, as they may
happen; and as these are illimitable in their nature, so it is impossible safely to
limit that capacity. . . . Where can we stop, short of an indefinite power of
providing for emergencies as they arise?”14 It is, in fact, the very nature of the
regime being planned—specifically, a commercial republic—that will prove an
attraction for foreign ambitions, hence require the provision of “indefinite
power”: “If we mean to be a commercial people,” continues Hamilton, “it must
form a part of our policy, to be able one day to defend that commerce.”15 The
argument echoes Machiavelli’s: the Prince must have access to act with limitless
power in defense of the State; the State’s unleashed ambitions will lead to
national wealth and greatness, making it more likely that other nations will seek
to appropriate and invade; and thus, by a kind of iron syllogism, the ambition for
national greatness and wealth makes the accumulation of unlimited power
necessary and inescapable.
The Founders were aware that if their architecture was well designed,
people’s allegiance would shift from their natural affections for their local places
and light instead on the power and magnificence of the capital. For this to occur,
the intuitive understanding of liberty as the practice of self-government would
need to be replaced by the experience of liberty as expanding “diversity of
faculties”—whether unbounded increases in property and wealth or the
experience of “more Being” that philosopher Richard Rorty described as the
consequence of advancing liberal democracy. The Founders would not be
surprised that a populace shaped by the modern form of private, material,
individual, expressive liberty would displace allegiance to local and civic liberty,
and that all attention and focus would be redirected to Washington, D.C., as the
source and guarantor of expressive liberty.
This end would be advanced through an electoral arrangement that the
Framers hoped would ensure the election to national office of men of particular
distinction. The “enlarged orbit” of the nation and the prospects for greatness at
the federal level would prove a draw to men of singular ambition whose interests
aligned with the project of American national greatness. In an argument meant to
dismiss fears of antifederalists that the central government would usurp the
activities of the states, Hamilton actually confirmed that this was exactly the aim
of the new federal government, thereby revealing the type of character that he
believed would be drawn to the central government:
I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of
the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description. The
regulation of mere domestic police of a state appears to me to hold out slender allurements to
ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend the objects which have
charms for minds governed by that passion: and all the powers necessary to those objects ought in
the first instance to be lodged in the national depository. . . . It is therefore improbable that there
should exist a disposition in the federal councils to usurp the [local] powers. . . . The possession of
them . . . would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, and to the splendor of the
national government.16
L
IBERALISM has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes
fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively
than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them. The result is
the systemic rolling blackouts in electoral politics, governance, and economics,
the loss of confidence and even belief in legitimacy among the citizenry, that
accumulate not as separable and discrete problems to be solved within the liberal
frame but as deeply interconnected crises of legitimacy and a portent of
liberalism’s end times.
The narrowing of our political horizons has rendered us incapable of
considering that what we face today is not a set of discrete problems solvable by
liberal tools but a systemic challenge arising from pervasive invisible ideology.
The problem is not in just one program or application but in the operating system
itself. It is almost impossible for us to conceive that we are in the midst of a
legitimation crisis in which our deepest systemic assumptions are subject to
dissolution.
The “Noble Lie” of liberalism is shattering because it continues to be
believed and defended by those who benefit from it, while it is increasingly seen
as a lie, and not an especially noble one, by the new servant class that liberalism
has produced. Discontent is growing among those who are told by their leaders
that their policies will benefit them, even as liberalism remains an article of
ardent faith among those who ought to be best positioned to comprehend its true
nature. But liberalism’s apologists regard pervasive discontent, political
dysfunction, economic inequality, civic disconnection, and populist rejection as
accidental problems disconnected from systemic causes, because their self-
deception is generated by enormous reservoirs of self-interest in the maintenance
of the present system. This divide will only widen, the crises will become more
pronounced, the political duct tape and economic spray paint will increasingly
fail to keep the house standing. The end of liberalism is in sight.
This denouement might take one of two forms. In the first instance, one can
envision the perpetuation of a political system called “liberalism” that, becoming
fully itself, operates in forms opposite to its purported claims about liberty,
equality, justice, and opportunity. Contemporary liberalism will increasingly
resort to imposing the liberal order by fiat—especially in the form of the
administrative state run by a small minority who increasingly disdain democracy.
End runs around democratic and populist discontent have become the norm, and
backstopping the liberal order is the ever more visible power of a massive “deep
state,” with extensive powers of surveillance, legal mandate, police power, and
administrative control. These methods will continue to be deployed despite
liberalism’s claim to rest on consent and popular support. Such a conclusion is
paradoxical, not unlike Tocqueville’s conclusion in Democracy in America, in
which he envisions democracy culminating in a new form of despotism.
But the instabilities that surely would accompany this outcome suggest a
second possible denouement—the end of liberalism and its replacement by
another regime. Most people envisioning such scenarios rightly warn of the
likely viciousness of any successor regime, and close to hand are the examples
of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, and Russia’s
brief flirtation with liberalism before the imposition of communism. While these
brutal and failed examples suggest that such possibilities are unlikely to generate
widespread enthusiasm even in a postliberal age, some form of populist
nationalist authoritarianism or military autocracy seems altogether plausible as
an answer to the anger and fear of a postliberal citizenry.
While growing discontent in Western liberal democracies suggests that either
outcome is a realistic possibility, neither is to be wished for in the form it is
likely to take. Yet the failure of liberalism itself invites this outcome, even as the
unwillingness of liberalism’s defenders to perceive their own complicity in
fostering widespread discontent among their fellow citizens only makes such a
lamentable outcome more likely. Liberalism’s defenders today regard their
discontented countrymen as backward and recidivist, often attributing to them
the most vicious motivations: racism, narrow sectarianism, or bigotry, depending
upon the issue at hand. To the extent that liberalism regards itself as a self-
healing, perpetual political machine, it remains almost unthinkable for its
apologists to grasp that its failure may lead to its replacement by a cruel and
vicious successor. No serious effort to conceive a humane postliberal alternative
is likely to emerge from the rear-guard defenders of a declining regime.
AFTER LIBERALISM
Imagining a humane alternative to either liberalocratic despotism or the rigid and
potentially cruel authoritarian regime that may replace it seems at best a parlor
game, at worst a fool’s errand. Yet engaging in the activity once central to
political philosophy—the negotiation between the utopian and realistic, begun
by Plato in the Republic—remains essential if the grimmer scenarios of a life
after liberalism are to be avoided, and something potentially better brought into
being. If today only the barest outlines may be discerned amid a landscape so
completely shaped by our liberal age, tentative first steps are required. The
destination is unknown and unforeseeable, and the journey will probably require
generations to complete.
I conclude by taking three of those initial steps.
Like all human projects, liberalism is not without its achievements. Living
within its cave, liberal humanity has been too self-congratulatory about its
successes; hence the need to show in these pages its deeper costs. But if we hope
to create a humane postliberal future, we cannot pretend that the age of
liberalism did not happen or that its basic contours can simply be jettisoned in
some sort of restoration of an idyllic preliberal age. That age never existed—
though, at the same time, the past can and ought to instruct as we move forward
toward new possibilities. Any steps toward a postliberal age must begin with a
sympathetic appreciation of liberalism’s appeal and an effort to realize the
admirable ideals that liberalism often only promised.
While liberalism pretended to be a wholly new edifice that rejected the
political architecture of all previous ages, it naturally drew upon long
developments from antiquity to the late Middle Ages. A significant part of its
appeal was not that it was something wholly new but that it drew upon deep
reservoirs of belief and commitment. Ancient political philosophy was especially
devoted to the question of how best to avoid the rise of tyranny, and how best to
achieve the conditions of political liberty and self-governance. The basic terms
that inform our political tradition—liberty, equality, dignity, justice,
constitutionalism—are of ancient pedigree. The advent of Christianity, and its
development in the now largely neglected political philosophy of the Middle
Ages, emphasized the dignity of the individual, the concept of the person, the
existence of rights and corresponding duties, the paramount importance of civil
society and a multiplicity of associations, and the concept of limited government
as the best means of forestalling the inevitable human temptation toward
tyranny. Liberalism’s most basic appeal was not its rejection of the past but its
reliance upon basic concepts that were foundational to the Western political
identity.
The architects of liberalism embraced the language and terms of the classical
and Christian traditions even as they transformed both meaning and practice.
They especially rejected the classical and Christian understanding of human
beings as fundamentally relational creatures—“social and political animals”—
and proposed that liberty, rights, and justice could best be achieved by radically
redefining human nature. The result was an advance in rendering the political
longings of the intellectual West vastly more accessible and popular, but at the
cost of establishing a political world that undermined those ideals. Liberalism’s
break with the past was founded on a false anthropology; yet at the same time,
those ideals have been rendered more universal and secure in significant part
through the growing discontent with liberalism’s failure to realize them.
A vast disconnect once existed between the philosophy of the West and its
practices. The ideals of liberty, equality, and justice coexisted with extensive
practices of slavery, bondage, inequality, disregard for the contributions of
women, and arbitrary forms of hierarchy and application of law. Liberalism was
a sign of the profound success of the West’s most fundamental philosophical
commitments, a manifestation of a widespread demand that daily practices
should more closely conform to ideals.
Yet while advancing these ideals, liberalism ultimately betrayed them
through its disfiguring conception of human nature and the politics, economics,
education, and application of technology that resulted from it. Today, as in past
centuries, a vast disconnect exists between our stated ideals and our practices,
but unlike past eras, the ideological nature of liberalism makes our current
disconnection difficult to perceive, because now the failure to achieve those
ideals is endemic to liberalism itself. The word “freedom” is embraced as the
fundamental commitment of our age, but in vast swaths of life, freedom seems to
recede—many citizens, for instance, believe they have little actual control over
or voice in their government. Motivation by many voters in advanced
democracies reflects not the confident belief that their voice is being heard, but
the conviction that their vote is against a system that no longer recognizes the
claim to self-rule. At the same time, freedom in areas such as consumer choice
expands exponentially, leading many to take on too much debt to feed ultimately
unfulfillable cravings. We effectively possess little self-government, either as
citizens over our leaders or as individuals over our appetites. Citizens under
liberalism are assured of our civic potency while experiencing political weakness
and engaging in infinite acts of choice that are only deeper expressions of
thralldom. We have endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options
over whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening boredom
within them. All the while, liberalism claims that we are free, and in spite of
pervasive misgivings and growing discontent, we believe in an equivalence of
word and deed.
Part of moving toward a postliberal age is recognizing that while liberalism’s
initial appeal was premised upon laudatory aspirations, its successes have often
been based on a disfigurement of those aspirations. Its defenders often point to
the liberation of women from conditions of inequality as a significant example of
liberalism’s success, and regard any critique of liberalism as a proposal to thrust
women back into preliberal bondage. Yet the main practical achievement of this
liberation of women has been to move many of them into the workforce of
market capitalism, a condition that traditionalists like Wendell Berry as well as
Marxist political theorists like Nancy Fraser regard as a highly dubious form of
liberation.1 All but forgotten are arguments, such as those made in the early
Republic, that liberty consists of independence from the arbitrariness not only of
a king but of an employer. Today we consider the paramount sign of the
liberation of women to be their growing emancipation from their biology, which
frees them to serve a different, disembodied body—“corporate” America—and
participate in an economic order that effectively obviates any actual political
liberty. Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount
to liberation, but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more
encompassing bondage.
Liberalism arose by appeal to an ennobling set of political ideals and yet
realized new and comprehensive forms of degradation. Put less charitably, the
architects of liberalism intentionally appropriated widely shared political ideals
and subverted them to the advantage of those most capable of benefiting from
new definitions of liberty, democracy, and republicanism.2 Building on
liberalism’s successes means recognizing both the legitimacy of its initial appeal
and the deeper reasons for its failure. It means offering actual human liberty in
the form of both civic and individual self-rule, not the ersatz version that
combines systemic powerlessness with the illusion of autonomy in the form of
consumerist and sexual license. Liberalism was both a boon and a catastrophe
for the ideals of the West, perhaps a necessary step whose failures, false
promises, and unfulfilled longings will lead us to something better.
Liberalism was launched with the claim that it would “take men as they are,”
grounding a new politics upon a clear-sighted realism about human nature. Yet
its claims about humans “as they are” were premised upon the fiction of
radically autonomous humans in a State of Nature. The political, social, and
economic order shaped around this disfigured view of human nature succeeded
in remaking people in this image, but the project had the predictable effect of
liberating them from the reality of relational life. Liberalism has always been
animated by a vision of how humans “ought” to live, but it masked these
normative commitments in the guise of neutrality. Like its competitor ideologies,
it called forth a massive political and economic apparatus to fulfill its vision—in
the process both reshaping and damaging humanity. A more humane politics
must avoid the temptation to replace one ideology with another. Politics and
human community must percolate from the bottom up, from experience and
practice.
One of liberalism’s most damaging fictions was the theory of consent, an
imaginary scenario in which autonomous, rational calculators formed an abstract
contract to establish a government whose sole purpose was to “secure rights.”
This view of consent relegated all “unchosen” forms of society and relationships
to the category of “arbitrary” and thus suspect if not illegitimate. Liberalism
today has successfully expanded itself from a political project to a social and
even familial one, acting most often as solvent upon all social bonds. Yet as
liberalism faces more challenging frontiers—especially those religious
institutions that fundamentally reject liberal premises—we witness an
increasingly visible and active government advancing its project through efforts
to control religious and familial practice and belief.3
Liberalism takes the fundamental position that “consent” to any relationship
or bond can be given only when people are completely and perfectly
autonomous and individual. Only then are they able to consciously and
purposefully engage in forms of utilitarian relationality, and also thereby capable
of remaking such bonds when they prove to be unsatisfactory. I recall a chilling
conversation when I was teaching at Princeton University about a book that had
recently appeared about the Amish. We were discussing the practice of
Rumspringa—literally, “running around”—a mandatory time of separation of
young adults from the community during which they partake of the offerings of
modern liberal society.4 The period of separation lasts usually about a year, at the
end of which the young person must choose between the two worlds. An
overwhelming number, approaching 90 percent, choose to return to be baptized
and to accept norms and strictures of their community that forbid further
enjoyment of the pleasure of liberal society. Some of my former colleagues took
this as a sign that these young people were in fact not “choosing” as free
individuals. One said, “We will have to consider ways of freeing them.” Perfect
liberal consent requires perfectly liberated individuals, and the evidence that
Amish youth were responding to the pull of family, community, and tradition
marked them as unfree.
Liberalism renders such ties suspect while papering over the ways in which it
has shaped its own youth to adopt a particular form of life, set of beliefs, and
worldview; these are never subject to appraisal by any standards outside
liberalism itself. The traditional culture of the Amish (one can also think of other
examples) gives its young a choice about whether they will remain within that
culture, but only one option is seen as an exercise of choice. Acquiescence to
liberalism, however unreflective, is “tacit consent,” yet membership in a
traditional community is “oppression” or “false consciousness.”
Under this double standard, religious, cultural, and familial membership is an
accident of birth. Yet for modern humanity in the advanced West and
increasingly the world, liberalism is equally an unwitting inheritance, and any
alternatives are seen as deeply suspect and probably in need of liberal
intervention. Liberalism further overlooks the way that culture itself is a deeper
form of consent. Culture and tradition are the result of accumulations of practice
and experience that generations have willingly accrued and passed along as a gift
to future generations. This inheritance is the result of a deeper freedom, the
freedom of intergenerational interactions with the world and one another. It is the
consequence of collected practice, and succeeding generations may alter it if
their experience and practices lead to different conclusions.
The sustenance of existing cultural and religious practices and the building
of new communities will require far more conscientiousness than the passive
acquiescence now fostered toward liberalism itself. It is an irony (and arguably a
benefit of a liberal age) that today it is liberalism itself that silently shapes an
unreflective population, and that the development of new cultures is what
requires conscious effort, deliberation, reflectiveness, and consent. This is true
especially for religious communities in an age in which liberalism has become
increasingly hostile to self-imposed limitations and strictures that it finds
abhorrent, particularly, but not only, in the domain of personal and sexual
autonomy—a stance that many see as betrayal of liberalism rather than its
culmination. But this very conflict, by showing the lengths to which liberalism
will go to reshape the world in its own image, shows the need for alternative
communities and new cultures that will live outside the gathering wreckage of
liberalism’s twilight years.
PREFACE
1. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New
York: Vintage, 1992), 162.
2. Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Democracy and the Citizen: Community, Dignity, and the Crisis of
Contemporary Politics in America,” in Redeeming Democracy in America, ed. Patrick J. Deneen and Susan
J. McWilliams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 27.
INTRODUCTION
1. Adrian Vermuele, Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2016).
2. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor, 2000), 7.
3. From a response essay to David Brooks “Organization Kid,” by a member of Notre Dame class of
2018, in my course Political Philosophy and Education, August 29, 2016. Paper in author’s possession.
4. Wendell Berry, “Agriculture from the Roots Up,” in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays
(Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005), 107–8.
5. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
6. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(New York: Basic, 2011).
7. Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the Family (New
York: HarperPerennial, 1998); Mark Shiffman, “Humanity 4.5,” First Things, November 2015.
CONCLUSION
1. Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body and the Machine,” in What Are People For? (New York: North
Point, 1990); Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neo-Liberal Crisis
(New York: Verso, 2013).
2. Cavanaugh, “‘Killing for the Telephone Company.’”
3. In addition to aggressive efforts to narrowly define religious freedom as “freedom of worship” under
the Obama administration, consider efforts to define the relationship of parents and children in liberal
political terms and thus to put them under the supervision of the state. See, for instance, Samantha Goldwin,
“Against Parental Rights,” Columbia Law Review 47, no. 1 (2015).
4. Tom Shachtman, Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish (New York: North Point, 2007).
5. Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York:
Sentinel, 2017).
6. Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (Left to
Right, 2010).
7. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 510.
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Index
abortion, (i)
abstraction, (i)
academic freedom, (i)
administrative state, (i), (ii)
Against Democracy (Brennan), (i)
alienation, (i)
Alone Together (Turkle), (i)
Amish, (i), (ii), (iii)
anticulture, (i)
apocalypticism, (i)
Aquinas, Thomas, (i), (ii), (iii)
Arendt, Hannah, (i)
aristocracy, (i), (ii)
Aristotle, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Augustine, Saint, bishop of Hippo, (i)
automobiles, (i)
Average Is Over (Cowen), (i)
Bacon, Francis: Dewey’s admiration for, (i), (ii); mastery of nature sought by, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi),
(vii)
Bellamy, Francis, (i)
Benedict Option, The (Dreher), (i)
Berry, Wendell, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Bloom, Allan, (i)n9
Boorstin, Daniel J., (i), (ii)
Brennan, Jason, (i), (ii), (iii)n28
Brexit, (i), (ii), (iii)
brood parasitism, (i)
bureaucracy, (i)
Burke, Edmund, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Bush, George W., (i)n15
education, (i)
elections, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); diminished faith in, (i); Locke’s proposals for, (i); presidential, (i); proposals to
restrict, (i); turnout in, (i)
Ellul, Jacques, (i)
“End of History, The” (Fukuyama), (i), (ii)
environmentalism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
epistocracy, (i)
Escape from Freedom (Fromm), (i)
Ethics (Aristotle), (i)
European Union, (i)
executive branch, (i), (ii)
Facebook, (i)
factions, (i), (ii), (iii)
fascism, (i), (ii), (iii)
federalism, (i), (ii)
Federalist, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Federal Reserve, (i)
financial crisis, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Firestone, Shulamith, (i)n6
Fish, Charles, (i)n3
Frankenstein (Shelley), (i)
Fraser, Nancy, (i)
freedom of association, (i)
free speech, (i), (ii), (iii)
French Revolution, (i)
Friedman, Jeffrey, (i), (ii)
Friedman, Thomas, (i)
Fromm, Erich, (i)
“From Porch to Patio” (Thomas), (i)
Fukuyama, Francis, (i), (ii), (iii)
paideia, (i)
Paine, Thomas, (i)
placelessness, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Plato, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Player Piano (Vonnegut), (i)
pluralism, (i)
Polanyi, Karl, (i)
political philosophy, (i)
Politics (Aristotle), (i)
popular culture, (i)
Postman, Neil, (i)
postmodernism, (i), (ii)
poststructuralism, (i)
poverty, (i)
“Power of the Powerless, The” (Havel), (i)
presentism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
professionalization, (i)
Progressivism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Founders’ liberalism likened to, (i)
property rights, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Purcell, Edward A., (i)
Puritans, (i), (ii)
Putnam, Robert, (i), (ii)