“The new book by the political scientist Patrick J. Deneen
proposes to replace the country’s “invasive progressive tyranny” with conservative
rule in the name of the “common good.”
It isn’t easy being Patrick J. Deneen. In 2018, he published
“Why Liberalism Failed,” a scathing and sweeping critique that was attentively
discussed by the very people (establishment politicians, Ivy League academics,
mainstream journalists) he depicted as too ruthless and arrogant to care about
the problems ravaging the country: ecological degradation, economic
devastation, social isolation, deaths of despair. Magazine sections were given
over to debating Deneen’s thesis; Barack Obama promoted the book on his reading
list. Multiple articles in this newspaper parsed his argument, precisely
because it voiced some of the discontent that had helped propel Donald J. Trump
into the highest office.
Yet if Deneen’s new book, “Regime Change,” is any
indication, he and his fellow social conservatives are feeling as persecuted as
ever. Never mind that the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade last
year, and statewide bans on abortions are proceeding apace. Or that red-state
lawmakers are removing books on the barest pretext that they might offend
conservative sensibilities. In “Regime Change,” Deneen, who teaches political
theory at the University of Notre Dame, depicts the current dispensation as not
just inadequate but unbearable — so much so that he deigns to go beyond
theorizing to propose what he would like to do about it.
He spends the early chapters railing against that trusted
bugaboo of right-wing pundits — academics who “veil their status” by speaking
the language of egalitarianism while basking in the privilege and prestige
conferred by their fancy degrees. In a particularly heated passage, he writes
about how the political scientist Charles Murray, a co-author of “The Bell
Curve,” notoriously linking intelligence to race and class, was invited to
speak at Middlebury College in 2017 and then shouted down by protests that
turned violent.
Deneen finds this hypocrisy especially galling. He points
out that Middlebury is extremely expensive to attend. It is also, Deneen notes,
“among the most selective schools in America — accepting only 17 percent of
applicants in 2017.” (If Deneen is bothered by the fact that Notre Dame’s
acceptance rate stands at 15 percent, he doesn’t say.) For a book that’s
ostensibly about the oppressively liberal American political system, a
surprising number of pages are devoted to the ins and outs of what happens on
elite college campuses.
But all the campus adventures amount to so much
throat-clearing before he gets to the gravamen of his argument.
In the introduction, he gives a hint at what’s to come:
“What is needed — and what most ordinary people instinctively seek — is
stability, order, continuity and a sense of gratitude for the past and
obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word
for it, is a conservatism that conserves.”
The confidence (and condescension) is breathtaking, but it
turns out that Deneen doesn’t believe that “ordinary people” are up to the task
of effecting the necessary change. They have been too degraded by an “invasive
progressive tyranny” to yield anything other than a populist movement that is
“untutored and ill led,” he writes, alluding to Trump. After spending 150 pages
disparaging the “elite,” Deneen goes on, in the last third of the book, to try
to reclaim the word for a “self-conscious aristoi” who would dispense with all
the liberal niceties about equality and freedom and instead serve as the
vanguard of a muscular “aristopopulism.”
The desired result, he says, would be a “mixed regime” or
“mixed constitution.” Scholars have already discerned some traces of a mixed
constitution in the American system’s separation of powers, but Deneen
envisions something more radical (and less liberal) than “checks and balances.”
He wants a “blending,” or “melding,” of the conservative
elite with the (non-liberal) populace, their interests and sensibilities fusing
into “one thing.” As much as he tries to dance around how such a profound
transformation might come about — devoting page upon page to windy
disquisitions on Tocqueville and Aristotle — he eventually admits what he
believes it would take: “The raw assertion of political power by a new
generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good
conservatism.”
Here we go. Deneen spends much of “Regime Change” taking
cover in gauzy abstractions, so it’s the occasional blunt-force statement like
this that reveals what he would ultimately like to see. There is a lot about
“the past” in this book and barely any actual history. He gets misty-eyed
reminiscing about the “quiet leadership” provided by “small-town doctors” and a
Hollywood that produced movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
It all sounds gentle and quaint except when Deneen erupts in
demands for an “overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class.”
Deneen offers a vague reassurance that the “raw assertion of
political power” would somehow be wielded in a “peaceful but vigorous” way,
proposing that the number of representatives in the House be expanded to a
truly wild 6,000 and pointing to autocratic Hungary’s efforts “to increase
family formation and birth rates” as exemplary. He also offers a vague
reassurance that the postliberal future will not revive the prejudice and
bigotry of the past. His prolix “to be sures” are so conspicuously awkward (“I
don’t want to be misunderstood as denying the justified and necessary
commitment to racial equality and respect owed toward people who have been
historically marginalized and excluded”) that one way to make reading this book
less of a slog would be to create a drinking game out of these labored attempts
to cover his flank.
But Deenen’s fellow social conservatives can take heart that
at least some prejudices — or “customs” — would remain, as Deneen decries what
he calls an “effort to displace ‘traditional’ forms of marriage, family and
sexual identity based in nature.” Never mind the shoddy thinking that somehow
equates pluralism with replacement, as if a same-sex marriage (or, as he puts
it, “marriage between two homosexuals”) is something that could “displace” a
marriage between a man and a woman.
Deneen’s worldview is unrelentingly zero-sum. He says he
seeks nothing less than the “renewal of the Christian roots of our
civilization.”
And what if you don’t want to live in this regime — one that
rejects “democratic pluralism” and sounds suspiciously like a theocracy? Well,
that’s too bad for you. “The common good is always either served or undermined
by a political order,” Deneen declares toward the end of his book. “There is no
neutrality on the matter.” He wants to recreate “the authoritative claims of
the village,” but on a national or even international scale — sidestepping the
uncomfortable fact that such grand projects have had, to put it mildly, a
troubling historical record. He calls on postliberals to aim big, “embracing,
fostering and protecting not only the nation but that which is both smaller and
larger than the nation.”
Underneath all the gemütlich verbs lurks a suggestion that
some readers may find chilling: a vision of the “common good” so obvious to
Deneen that it’s not up for debate or discussion.
________________________________________
REGIME CHANGE: Toward a Postliberal Future | By Patrick J.
Deneen | 269 pp. | Sentinel | $30
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
@jenszalai”
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