Who Gets to Define the ‘Good’?

Barton Swaim reviews Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future by Patrick Deneen. Excerpts:

"Mr. Deneen believes that Western individualism has taught our liberal elite that they bear no responsibility toward those below them. Their response to any social or political problem is to blame the little guy: the white wage earner, the divorced cop, the middle-class shopkeeper. It’s certainly true that many members of our credentialed elite in the 2020s appear uniquely incapable of self-criticism, but simply to blame this on “individualism” is unhelpful. Americans have lived in an individualist culture for a long time; the pathology Mr. Deneen describes is of a recent vintage. Something else is happening.

Whatever the cause of our discontents, “Regime Change” proposes two broad remedies. The first is to reconnect with an “older tradition” of conservatism that valorized ordinary people, traditional habits and common sense. The second is to promote a “mixed constitution,” an ideal in classical political philosophy, especially Aristotle, in which upper and lower classes counterbalance the vices and deficiencies of the other.

You might be tempted to think that the American Founders already gave us a mixed system, in which the three branches of government—and the upper and lower chambers of the legislative branch—each defend separate interests. But Mr. Deneen informs us that the Constitution “arguably subverted” the mixed ideal by narrowing its concern to “mechanisms that prevented certain exercises of power, rather than developing a true form of ‘mixing.’ ” In general, he thinks the Americans Founders were so much in thrall to proto-liberal thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes that they couldn’t envision the sort of “integrated” political system he favors.

To achieve these two aims, Mr. Deneen believes, conservatives will need to promote what he calls, in one of the least usable neologisms ever formulated, Aristopopulism. (The “Aristo” prefix stands for Aristotle.) To promote a populist mixing of estates, Mr. Deneen offers a variety of proposals, including a dramatic increase to the number of U.S. House seats (which he thinks would bring more ordinary folks to the lawmaking body) and mandatory national service.

“Regime Change,” unlike “Why Liberalism Failed,” appears to be written exclusively for people who already agree with its contentions. Rarely does Mr. Deneen anticipate a counterargument. Caricatures abound. In a discussion of American conservatism, the only proponents of classical liberalism he mentions are the “objectivist” weirdo Ayn Rand and a posse of “Never-Trumper” journalists. Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek are nowhere to be found. 

Mr. Deneen’s habit of misrepresenting beliefs he dislikes doesn’t prevent him from borrowing from them when the need arises. Consider the point about reconnecting with an “older tradition” of conservatism that esteems the insights of ordinary people. His account leaves the impression that no serious conservative writer in the past hundred years defended the values and habits of unlearned people. “Common-Good Conservatism,” he writes, as if announcing a new doctrine, “aligns itself in the first instance with the ‘common sense’ of ordinary people especially because they are the most instinctively conservative element in a social and political order.”

Of course, if you’ve read Michael Oakeshott’s “Rationalism in Politics,” say, or the essays of Irving Kristol or Thomas Sowell—or even if you’ve heard William F. Buckley’s quip that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard—you were already aware that this theme is basic to the conservatism Mr. Deneen ridicules as “right-liberalism.” He has, in fact, read Oakeshott’s famous book, which he cites on page 205 in “Why Liberalism Failed.” And it is inconceivable that he hasn’t read Kristol and Mr. Sowell and scores of other conservative intellectuals who’ve defended the mores of the uncredentialed against their cultured despisers. Forgive me if I begin to suspect that Mr. Deneen is not entirely on the up and up.

The true but sublimated strand of conservatism Mr. Deneen purports to revive includes very few names, but one is Edmund Burke (1729-97). It strikes me as possibly amiss to recruit the author of the phrase “swinish multitude” into the cause of populism, Aristo or otherwise, but I am willing to consider the case. When I try to follow Mr. Deneen on the subject of Burke, though, I feel none the wiser. Did Burke foresee the threat of “rising business interests” in England, as Mr. Deneen asserts? Maybe, but when he quotes the great Irish statesman as denouncing “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” I consult the citation to “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and discover that Burke was not talking about English bankers and capitalists but about the arrest, in his view disgraceful, of Marie Antoinette (“the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded”). Mr. Deneen goes on to quote Burke’s denunciation of French and English speculators (“gamesters”), also in “Reflections,” as if these passages indict capitalism or “business interests”; but Burke, as I read him, is there inveighing against loose monetary policy and attendant inflation, commonly criticized by the free-marketeers Mr. Deneen abhors.

The difficulty with which Mr. Deneen shoehorns Edmund Burke into his anti-liberal vision is one of many signs of that vision’s incoherence. Obvious contradictions go unaddressed in “Regime Change.” Mr. Deneen, happily echoing Karl Marx’s criticism, laments the ill social effects wrought by the division of labor. But a major part of Mr. Deneen’s common-good agenda involves bringing manufacturing back to the homeland. Well, which is it—more assembly lines or fewer? 

Mr. Deneen wants a traditional society that “appears ignorant in the eyes of ‘experts,’ but in fact is constituted by a deep well of experience and common-sense wisdom.” But he also wants a more expansive welfare state that supports low- and middle-income earners—one that, as Mr. Deneen describes it, uses “the power of the state to secure social safety nets targeted at supporting middle-class security.” Who does he think will manage the new welfare programs he would create? A lot of Ivy-educated “experts” and consultants with big ideas on how the ignorant masses should arrange their lives, that’s who. 

There is a cultivated perversity about the entire common-good, postliberal project. The liberal order, as it’s perhaps misleadingly called, was never the philosophically cohesive “regime” Mr. Deneen pretends it to be. It was, and for now remains, an imperfect and uneasy settlement between disparate, sometimes antipathetic factions that nonetheless find it expedient to live peaceably with each other on the basis of shared, or at least stated, ideals. But Mr. Deneen and his common-good allies prefer to define “liberalism” as a deliberately formulated “project” because only then can they pretend to draw up plans for its overthrow and redefinition according to their own ideas of righteousness.

He castigates “right-liberal” faux-conservatives, as he thinks of them, for making conservatism an “empty, relativistic label” that changes shape according to progressive whims. In the world he prefers, conservatives use state power for their own ends and don’t have to worry about what progressives will do with that power when they get it. 

Mr. Deneen and his fellow common-gooders are, in one sense, model progressives. If progressivism, both in its early-20th-century and present-day varieties, can be distilled into a single belief, it is that the way to solve any social or political problem, however tangled, is to put us in charge. For my own part, I would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 people in the phone book than by Patrick Deneen and his pals."