Let me say from the get-go that, for me, liberalism is as good as it gets for the political order. A politics that is not liberal is a loss for human flourishing. Patrick Deneen's "postliberal" manifesto only reinforces my conclusion.
The United States was established on liberalism — meaning our government is legitimized and limited by the sovereignty of its citizens (a democratic republic) and our political order is structured to secure liberty by recognizing unalienable rights.
Stalinists in their day pooh-poohed liberalism, arguing that its vaunted liberty and rights were smoke and mirrors to dupe the proletariat about its subservience to the bourgeoisie. Later, French so-called postmodernists argued that liberalism's liberty and rights were actually camouflaged instruments of repression.
In his new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, Deneen, a professor of political theory at the University of Notre Dame, blends a bit of both of these critiques to insist that liberalism leaves a working class floundering in chaos while disguising that same class' marginalization by a "managerial elite."
Needed, he insists, is a revolutionary regime change to replace liberalism with "aristopopulism."
Patrick Deneen (Courtesy of University of Notre Dame)
Regime Change begins with a brief reprise of Deneen's 2018 bestseller, Why Liberalism Failed, which highlighted the forces behind the election of President Donald Trump. Contending that we live in dystopian times thanks to the havoc generated by our liberal political order, the analysis is that liberalism is essentially an engine for progress. Generations ago, such progress seemed a good thing — overcoming slavery and so on — but in our time, liberalism's unremitting progressive change is eroding the foundations of civilization's social order.
As Regime Change proceeds, we learn that these eroding foundations are the "traditional" structures of society, like family, religion, morality and local community. Today's upper class, the managerial elite, ostensibly is insulated from the ill effects of this erosion thanks to various forms of privilege and being educated in techniques to navigate disruptive change. But not the working class.
When Deneen speaks of the working class, the image conveyed is of white blue-collar workers displaced economically by globalization's mauling of "flyover country" smokestack industries. Yet, while globalization's economic dislocations are also purported to be the result of liberalism, it is liberalism's disruption of the social structures of the working class that is the book's focus.
For the working class, we are told that traditional marriage and family can no longer be expected, that church is increasingly not part of working-class lives and that time-honored mores and moral norms no longer have convincing authority. Unions, clubs and civic organizations are less available for communal solidarity. Small towns and old blue-collar neighborhoods decay and wither.
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