A post-liberalism—if you can keep it
Dear Francis,
Hail fellow well met!
I trust my letter finds you well on this lovely Saturday mornings. How have things been for you?
I am going to keep this letter brief, for I have quite a bit to do today. This morning, I have been cogitating on an argument liberalism's most tireless critics—scholars like Patrick Deneen, for example—make for why the post-liberal era is not only inevitable but desirable. To wit, that liberalism has failed.
Has liberalism failed, Francis? Perhaps it has in some ways. Perhaps it has failed some people. While I am of the belief that liberalism's death has been greatly exaggerated, I still take seriously that it exists in a more enervated state than it once did. Liberalism, you might say, is feeling a little under the weather. Its legs are shaky and its face is pallid, and it's just feeling rather out of sorts.
Poor chap.
Deneen believes liberalism is either terminal or, at this point, under the sod. One way or the other, he says, we need an alternative—a post-liberal successor ideology. But is liberalism's putative failure evidence that we need an alternative to liberalism? Why isn't an equally plausible conclusion that we need a liberal restoration?
The times they are a-changin'
Deneen, and most of the post-liberals, are Catholic, and so they should understand better than most that humans are fallible. Things—kitchens, institutions, political systems, solar systems, and so forth—tend toward disorder. Entropy and whatnot. Every political system in history has eventually ended—or transmuted into something at once recognizable and different. Even the ancien regime eventually gave rise to liberalism. Monarchy became representative democracy.
America's Founding Fathers keenly understood that, in the absence of checks and balances, our system of government would devolve into tyranny. But even institutional checks and balances cannot act as bulwarks against change if the people do not support representative democracy. As John Adams once said, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Adams' specific claim about the religious underpinnings of the American political system can be debated, but what is doubtless true is that a liberal society will not last long if the multitudes, the cives romani, do not embrace liberalism. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of other societies where there is a dramatic incongruity between the hoi polloi and the institutions that surround them.
A post-liberalism—if you can keep it
What would Deneen and his post-liberal confrères replace liberalism with? No one is entirely sure. Integralism? Common good conservatism? A better elite?
One way or the other, whatever replaces liberalism will face the same centrifugal forces that brought down other regimes—because no set of political institutions is perfect. But like so many starry-eyed eggheads throughout the centuries, Deneen and his pursuivants write as though post-liberalism is, well, the end of history.
Deneen's Regime Change suffers from a welter of shortcomings and foibles, and I won't get into them all here. But one way Deneen could, in future books, buy a smidge of goodwill with his critics would be to acknowledge that the same humans who've supposedly driven liberalism into the ground will be at the wheel of the post-liberal future.
And if liberalism failed, then why won't post-liberalism?