‘Why Liberalism Failed’ Proclaims the Death of an Ideology
‘Why Liberalism Failed’, by Patrick Deneen, reviewed.
Imagine you live in a country where the gap between rich and poor is so vast that many do not bother trying to bridge it. Imagine that in some of your greatest cities, many cannot work, some due to long-standing sadness and worry. Imagine those problems also afflict the young, who are shy, cynical and dependent.
Imagine that – thank God – in this grim landscape, that you yourself are getting by. But you are becoming wary and suspicious. Everything you do or say online, where much of life takes place, follows you forever, and it is increasingly illegal to say things that upset people, even by accident, which makes you feel that you are walking on egg-shells.
Meanwhile, your movements are tracked by giant corporations who listen to your conversations and use psychological tricks to make you spend what money you have on things you do not need. When you go to watch your football team for a bit of escapism, cameras scan your face and record your features in minute detail. At work on Monday morning, your boss records your keystrokes. You have less and less in common with your workmates, since you all live wholly independent lives behind your screens. In the evenings, you sit in front of the television, and watch something to distract you from your gloom. What kind of hellish, sci-fi nightmare is this, you wonder? What tyrant-genius managed to make a system of such complete control? Ah, but there is no tyrant genius, says Patrick Deneen. This is the great liberal utopia — and you’re living in it.
Deneen, a political theorist and professor at Notre Dame, is the author of Why Liberalism Failed, in which he argues that liberalism inexorably brings about the opposite of what it claims to, that is, un-freedom, though of a subtle kind and in a subtle way. By lauding not the Christian and classical notion of liberty as self-rule but a simplistic, do-what-you-like-if-you-don’t-hurt-others version (confusingly called ‘classical’ liberalism), liberal ideology sweeps away all customs, conventions and communities and creates culture-less, placeless beings: atomised and alienated individuals who, perhaps unsurprisingly, feel rather lost. Furthermore, as we are ‘freed’ from family, church, community and those other groups that inculcate humane behaviour, we find ourselves with an ever-greater need to impose positive law. Consider Scotland’s new hate speech legislation: if we no longer pick up good manners from our communities, then soon we have to make up laws to stop ourselves from being unkind to one another. Liberalism ‘thus culminates in two ontological points: the liberated individual and the controlling state’.
As we are freed from family, church, community and other associations that inculcate humane behaviour, we have an ever-greater need to impose positive law.
This, if true, is of course rather ironic. If it seems counter-intuitive, then it may be because we assume, against the historical (and scientific) evidence, that more choice is always a good thing. As Barry Schwartz argues in The Paradox of Choice, it isn’t; and—which is more—we are liable, as individuals, to make poor choices. Per Edmund Burke, (a Whig, by the way, and thus a kind of proto-classical liberal): ‘the individual is foolish … the species is wise.’ Early Americans, Deneen says, were ‘Burkeans in practice’, even if the ideology of their constitution had more in common with the ideas of John Stuart Mill:
Most lived in accordance with custom—with basic moral assumptions concerning the fundamental norms that accompanied a good life. You should respect authority, beginning with your parents. You should display modest and courteous comportment. You should avoid displays of lewdness or titillation. You should engage in sexual activity only when married. Once married, you should stay married. You should have children—generally, lots of them. You should live within your means. You should thank and worship the Lord. You should pay respect to the elderly and remember and acknowledge your debts to the dead.
But that was then. Inevitably, liberalism has done away with much of this, which underwrote the life that de Toqueville wrote about in such effusive terms when he visited the young United States. Now, Deneen writes, the highest goal of the individual is instant gratification, the quenching of want, and our culture is synonymous with ‘hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness and distraction, all oriented toward promoting consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result,’ he adds, ‘superficially self-maximising, socially destructive behaviours begin to dominate society.’ And in a society in which there are few customs and ‘everything is allowed’ as long as it does not result in (measurable, mainly physical) harm, the strong also begin to dominate. ‘Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary,’ writes Deneen; ‘today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong.’ Deneen describes a ‘two-tier system’ in which a globally fungible elite drains the world of its value and embraces the globalised self-love that liberalism encourages.
‘Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary,’ writes Deneen; ‘today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong.’
Refreshingly, Deneen takes shots throughout his book at both the Left and the Right, accusing them of being two sides of the same shiny but worthless coin. Their shared working assumption is that more individual freedom is always a good thing; they simply have a different understanding of what that looks like. They both believe, says Deneen, in a kind of rootlessness and borderlessness, which is a recipe for despair. He has time neither for the individualism of classical liberals nor the statism of progressive liberals, since individualism and statism support one another and conspire to wrench the individual from nature while, in the end, show us only that respecting those constraints is the heart of wisdom.
Or so it seems to Deneen. But not only him: he himself has said he was shocked by the impact of his book, which he thought would be of interest only to political theorists. Before I read Why Liberalism Failed I had come across his work while reading thinkers on the Left and the Right whom cited him approvingly. He seems to have provided a framework within which certain writers can more persuasively assert their intuitions. Mary Harrington, to give one example, can more persuasively justify her claim that liberal feminism has not served women by setting out liberalism’s paradoxical tendency towards a kind of psychological un-freedom. And these writers can do this without sticking a flag in the ground, if you like—without saying, in other words, that they are of this or that party or belief system. They can step outside the ruling political paradigm. Deneen will surely give a far bigger group of people a way of explaining their disappointment with politics and political parties, which, to many, seem to be tinkering around the edges of a broken system. My worry is this: even if you accept that liberalism is broken, what on Earth do you replace it with?
