Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future - Hardcover

Deneen, Patrick J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593086902 ISBN 13: 9780593086902

Verlag: Sentinel, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

From Notre Dame professor and author of Why Liberalism Failed comes a provocative call for replacing the tyranny of the self-serving liberal elite with conservative leaders aligned with the interests of the working class

Classical liberalism promised to overthrow the old aristocracy, creating an order in which individuals could create their own identities and futures. To some extent it did—but it has also demolished the traditions and institutions that nourished ordinary people and created a new and exploitative ruling class. This class’s economic libertarianism, progressive values, and technocratic commitments have led them to rule for the benefit of the “few” at the expense of the “many,” precipitating our current political crises.
 
In Regime Change, Patrick Deneen proposes a bold plan for replacing the liberal elite and the ideology that created and empowered them. Grass-roots populist efforts to destroy the ruling class altogether are naive; what’s needed is the strategic formation of a new elite devoted to a “pre-postmodern conservatism” and aligned with the interest of the “many.” Their top-down efforts to form a new governing philosophy, ethos, and class could transform our broken regime from one that serves only the so-called meritocrats.
 
Drawing on the oldest lessons of the western tradition but recognizing the changed conditions that arise in liberal modernity, Deneen offers a roadmap for these changes, offering hope for progress after “progress” and liberty after liberalism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick J. Deneen is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. He has previously taught at Princeton University and Georgetown University. His most recent book is Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018, which has to date been translated into twenty languages.

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1

The End of Liberalism

Liberalism has generated its own undoing. As a philosophy and practical political project, one of its main aims was to overthrow the old aristocracy, in which one's social station and political position was secured by birthright. No matter how much one strived-or how dissolute one became-one's social and political rank could not be changed. This immutability was true not only in regard to one's political position, but as a consequence that much of one's identity was the consequence of birth. Liberalism proposed to overthrow this ancien régime and put in its place an order in which people, through their striving, ability, and hard work, could create an identity and future based upon the sum of their own choices.

Several hundred years into this experiment, we have witnessed firsthand the rise of a new ruling class, a "meritocracy" that has thrived under the conditions established and advanced by liberalism. Liberalism is today in crisis, not just because of the bad behavior of the new elite, but because its rise has corresponded with the attrition of institutions that benefited the lower classes while restraining the ambitious who wished to escape its restraints. The weakening of the family, neighborhood, church and religious community, and other associations has resulted in the degradation of the social and economic conditions of "the many," even as "the few" have garnered a monopoly both on economic and social advantages.

In the advanced liberal democracies across the world, working-class voters have risen up to reject the leaders who have regarded those who have been "left behind" with disdain and contempt. In response, liberalism has unmasked itself, revealing itself as an ideology that will force those who oppose it into submission, and advancing an increasingly "illiberal" liberalism. Efforts to limit the political power of the culturally dispossessed and economically disadvantaged-frequently by accusing majorities of being "antidemocratic"-increasingly reveal liberalism not to be a mutually shared comprehensive system that always allows self-determination, but rather a particular partisan set of commitments. The once unassailed public philosophy has been delegitimized.

As liberalism has careened toward its inevitable failure, politics across the Western world have been scrambled, no longer dividing between left and right liberals. Rather partisans who criticize the "people" (often composed of left and right liberals) and partisans who criticize the "elites" (today, most powerfully on the right, but also present on the left-for instance, Bernie Sanders and his criticisms of corporate elites) oppose each other. More than standing in opposition, they are in a vicious cycle as each side declines in virtue and strives for the destruction of the other, a cycle that will continue as long as liberalism remains the regnant regime.

To understand how the rise of liberalism resulted in this vicious cycle, it is necessary to understand how liberalism's conception of liberty created both a new ruling class and degraded the lives of the masses.

A premodern conception of liberty-expressed in the pages of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and the confluence of the philosophical schools of Athens and the biblical theological tradition in Jerusalem-was premised upon the ideal of self-rule, self-discipline, and self-government. The institutions of family, religion, and government raised guardrails on the otherwise natural appetites and desires that, when succumbed to, resulted in what this tradition regarded as a condition of servitude or slavery. The person who surrendered to the appetites was not only a slave, but also had the soul of a tyrant-a gluttony for power that would allow the enslaved tyrant to commit any act, any crime, any awful deed. All of the citizenry, including the powerful, needed to be habituated to the virtue that accorded with freedom, and the guardrails helped with that education for liberty.

By contrast, liberalism's architects proposed a vision of freedom as liberation from limitations imposed by birthright. To realize this liberation it was necessary not only to overthrow rule by inheritance but the older social forms that had taught and reinforced the cultivation of virtue. The realization of a new liberty required the dismantling of older institutions that had cultivated the classical ideal of liberty.

What had previously been considered as "guardrails" came instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations upon individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberal liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefining, or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts, and even the churches. In their place, a flattened world arose: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a vast and widening playground for the project of self-creation.

Today, liberalism's dismantling of guardrails is often described as a heroic story of progress in which past injustices were overcome, ushering in an age of enlightenment, justice, liberty, and equality. Oppressed people were liberated from the unjust constraints of a dark age. Anyone questioning the narrative is accused of defending privilege and nostalgically craving to reinstitute the injustices of a benighted past.

This narrative is a classic example of "Whig history," a self-congratulatory story told by the ruling class about its inevitable and beneficent ascent. The story told by liberals-like all "Whig history"-is self-serving to their cause, even at the cost of getting the history wrong and ignoring lessons of the past about "limiting" institutions that actually served freedom.

Consider, for instance, arguments made by one of liberalism's heroes, John Stuart Mill. In his classic text On Liberty, Mill denounced the constraining role of tradition in favor of an open, liberal society that advantages those who seek to disrupt these kinds of formative institutions. In Mill's parlance, custom was a "despot" over the lives of those who wished to instead engage in "experiments in living." While it's doubtless the case that custom appears to be a "despot" to those who seek to disrupt and overthrow long-standing traditions and customs of society, from another perspective, custom and the associated array of institutions that support and perpetuate ongoing cultural practices exist not merely to prevent the liberty of self-inventions, but to protect ordinary people from the potential rapaciousness of the ambitious. Viewed in such a light, these informal but pervasive cultural forms not only prevent efforts of a revolutionary character from reordering society around the imperative of individual liberty, but they protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people, people who are not well served by instability, generational discontinuity, institutionalized disorder-in short, what Mill calls "progress."

Mill's contemporary across the English Channel, Alexis de Tocqueville, precisely in this light understood the threats of liberation from ambient culture. Observing the likely rise of a more "revolutionary" class in a liberalizing America, Tocqueville wrote admiringly especially of the constraining power of religion.

But revolutionaries in America are obliged to profess openly a certain respect for the morality and equity of Christianity, which does not permit them to violate its laws easily when they are opposed to the execution of their designs . . . Up to now, no one has been encountered in the United States who dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society. An impious maxim-one that seems to have been invented in a century of freedom to legitimate all the tyrants to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sentinel
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593086902
• ISBN 13: 9780593086902
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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