Why Liberalism Failed

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapter 6-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction Summary: “The End of Liberalism”

The roots of liberalism as an explicitly conceived political philosophy can be traced back to the 16th century. From the beginning, liberalism was the foundation of the American political system, which was devoted to upholding human beings as individuals with pre-given rights capable of pursuing some version of a good life. However, when one looks around today, America does not seem to be a vibrantly healthy place: “The signs of the times suggest that much is wrong with America. A growing chorus of voices even warn that we may be witnessing the end of the Republic unfolding before our eyes” (2).

Deneen argues that liberalism is beginning to fail because it has succeeded. By implanting itself deep into the American psyche and its institutions, “its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology” (3). Based on the evidence, there is a legitimate reason to wonder if America is heading toward its inevitable demise rather than beginning to blossom.

In the 20th century, three competing political ideologies dominated—fascism, communism, and liberalism—and liberalism is the only one that has resulted in widespread acclaim, success, and approval. However, Deneen suggests that liberalism may be crueler than commonly supposed because it is more cunning and its flaws are more difficult to discern. In this way, it is a more difficult disease to diagnose and cure. Liberalism has become an ideology, and all ideologies fail for two reasons: “first, because it is based on falsehood about human nature […] and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain” (6). As a decaying ideology, liberalism has affected the way that we think and engage in politics, economics, and education.

In politics, there is a growing consensus that governments have grown too large, too overbearing, and too unresponsive to the actual needs of the citizens for whom they are meant to care. The idea that contemporary governments are limited would be, to most individuals of the past, a fantasy, thanks to concerted efforts to install a surveillance state controlled by military force, centralized banking constantly bailed out by federal institutions, and the like.

As to economics, there is a paradox: While liberal regimes have been widely successful in drawing millions out of poverty, it is nevertheless true that there has never before been such a wide gap between the haves and the have-nots, between the upper and lower classes (to say nothing of the rapidly vanishing middle class). As the author points out, “few civilizations appear to have so extensively perfected the separation of winners from losers or created such a massive apparatus to winnow those who will succeed from those who will fail” (9).

Regarding education, the classical tradition of the liberal arts so prized in previous eras of modern education—the educational heritage of the Ivy League schools, for instance—has ceded almost all ground to practical education in the servile arts. No longer is education primarily a means to a better life or intellectual enrichment for the individual; instead, it is merely a key to the individual’s economic potential and future earnings. Science and technology have greatly contributed to this shift in perspective, especially since the same approach to nature that allowed humanity to conquer the world is now directly contributing to humanity’s destruction of the same: Technology is now beginning to control people, rather than the other way around.

Liberalism is supposedly built upon shared commitments and philosophical consensus on what it means to be a person, a community, and a society as a whole. Deneen argues, “Yet liberalism’s innovations—ones that its architects believed would more firmly secure human liberty and dignity—which consisted especially of a redefinition of the ideal of liberty and a reconception of human nature, have undermined the realization of its stated commitments” (19). Determining how to move forward will be a fraught endeavor, but one that is necessary.

Chapter 1 Summary: “Unsustainable Liberalism”

The attraction to liberalism is undoubtedly based in large part in how very successful it has proved to be in practice: “No other political philosophy had proven in practice that it could fuel prosperity, provide relative political stability, and foster individual liberty with such regularity and predictability” (21). The origins and aims of liberalism are contained within its etymology: Coming from the Latin word libertas, politics has always been concerned (in some way) with ensuring liberty for its citizens. In ancient Greece, the stress was on education and training in virtue and excellence. In Roman politics, and later in Christian regimes throughout most of the first and second millennia, “institutional forms that sought to check the power of leaders” were developed to build on more ancient forms of governments (22).

Some contemporary scholars believe that liberalism is a straightforward development of ancient regimes and that it has developed, evolved, and improved on those to the point where it exists today. Others are more critical, claiming that liberalism represents an explicit and obvious break with the political traditions of the past.

One of the main reasons some hold that liberalism is a break with the past is that it has redefined what it means by “liberty.” In the past, liberty was seen as a means of cultivating self-control, “discipline and training in self-limitation of desires” (23), and it was agreed that political institutions were meant to encourage and push citizens toward this goal. In attempting to rid politics of this concern with personal virtue, three primary goals were set in place that required concerted effort from post-Enlightenment thinkers.

First, “politics would be based upon reliability of ‘the low’ rather than aspiration to ‘the high’” (24). Efforts to inculcate virtue in the citizenry were seen as paternalistic and patriarchal, as well as a relic of religious coercion. Second, “the classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue and the cultivation of self-limitation and self-rule relied upon reinforcing norms and social structures” (25)—this was an emphasis that had to be rejected from the public square as contrary to individual, secular (i.e., neutral) rights. Third, “human subjection to the dominion and limits of nature needed also to be overcome” (26). In contrast to more ancient worldviews where human beings interacted with nature in harmony, the natural world would now be something with which human beings were in competition, and which must be controlled and dominated at all costs.

The liberal state is now one that no longer focuses on the holistic sense and care for the common good, but rather sets up laws and rules based on maximizing the protection of individual rights from extrinsic distress: “Only the state can limit our natural liberty: the state is the sole creator and enforcer of positive law” (32). With this new understanding of the human person—that they are naturally “nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous” (32)—the liberal state and its goals cannot pretend neutrality. Liberalism is thus a system that is at war with classical notions of the human person and the world that human beings inhabit.

Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis

The opening of the work does not immediately focus on liberalism’s shortcomings—why it has, as the book’s title asserts, “failed”—but on the implications of its success. Although there are many ways in which Deneen criticizes liberalism on its own merits after the Introduction, his starting point is actually one that posits a great irony: Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded.

In other words, Deneen believes that liberalism is intrinsically faulty as a political worldview and that it cannot do anything but fail thanks to its presumptions, first principles, and goals that it aims to achieve. Rather than claim that modern liberal democracies have simply failed to achieve the ends that liberalism aims for, Deneen claims that liberalism has been quite explicitly and successfully implemented by many governments—the United States of America chief among them—and that we are seeing the fruits of this success now in all of America’s failings. For Deneen, the results of liberalism’s success expose The Unsustainability of Liberalism as a political ideology—it is its unsustainability that is at the heart of its ultimate failure.

Deneen believes that there is a single fundamental error that liberalism makes, and that error is one of a mistaken anthropology. He argues that contemporary liberalism is rooted in a post-Enlightenment worldview that makes certain claims about what human beings are, how they exist in the world, and how they are meant to interact with each other and with nature. Deneen regards liberalism’s worldview as breaking with many of the political beliefs and values of the past, often to humanity’s detriment.

In humanity’s interactions with nature, Deneen asserts that liberalism has replaced the more cooperative ancient approach with one based on exploitation and domination of the natural world, leading to unsustainability in the environment. From construction-induced erosion of shorelines, to the extinction of various animal species, to various levels of carbon-dioxide effusion into the atmosphere, human beings are capable of impacting the world around them. The problem is that so many of the problems that are acknowledged today are a direct result of various policies set into place by liberal regimes. Deneen writes,

As the farmer and author Wendell Berry has written, if modern science and technology were conceived as a ‘war against nature,’ then ‘it is a war in every sense—nature is fighting us as much as we are fighting it. And…it appears that we are losing’ (14).

If nature is viewed as an enemy to be conquered and subjugated, it is no wonder—says Deneen—that nature seems to be fighting back, and violently so.

On top of the consequences evident in the natural world, the more long-lasting effects might actually be within human beings themselves. The contemporary view of how liberty should be defined is at odds with its classical definition, leading to The Loss of Individual Virtue and Self-Restraint. As Deneen argues, the older ideal of liberty was not about the absolute power and freedom to make any choice whatsoever—the manner in which liberty (or freedom) is defined today—but instead concerned itself with questions about human limitations and duties.

The quest for liberty was formerly seen as a quest to cultivate virtue and self-control. Communities were designed to make this quest as easy as possible, with individual virtue in turn perpetuating sustainable communities that were favorable for families and centered upon the common good. In addition, the Christian religious tradition advanced this understanding to the highest degree, “reinforcing norms and social structures arrayed extensively throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial life” (25).

Modern liberalism, however, sought to deconstruct these long-established boundaries and aims in favor of increasing personal autonomy, leading to the quandaries many find themselves in today where there are competing claims to individual rights. In many ways, Deneen argues, modern liberalism has more in common with Machiavelli and his view of “might makes right” than with the classical tradition where liberty is a good to be pursued for the sake of not just the individual but the community as a whole. In stressing that the older ideal of liberty was ultimately about duty and responsibility rather than individual claims and rights, Deneen presents modern liberalism as a historical aberration, alluding to The Destruction of Organic Culture that he will more fully explore later in the book.