The following review is part of RealClear Books and Culture’s symposium on Patrick Deneen’s “Regime Change.”
Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame and the author of 2018’s “Why Liberalism Failed,” takes a radical step forward in his latest book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.” Here, Deneen turns his critique of liberalism into a blueprint for an alternative future.“Why Liberalism Failed” offered a damning indictment of the evolution of the concept of “liberty.” It traced liberty’s journey from its roots in Ancient Greek and early Christian political philosophy—where it was associated with the cultivation of virtue and self-restraint—to its modern incarnation in classical liberalism, which prioritizes personal freedom from oppressive power or customs. Reminiscent of Leo Strauss’ contrasting analysis of “Classic Natural Right” and “Modern Natural Right” in “Natural Right and History,” the ancient conception of liberty is championed by Deneen. The modern conception, in Deneen’s view, spawned societal pathologies that the modern liberal framework cannot solve. His proposed solution in “Why Liberalism Failed” was to lean into the creation of a counterculture that would stand in defiance of this dominant paradigm, a sentiment resonating with the likes of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” strain of community-based Christianity, a self-contained and intentional microcosm that can survive the horrors of another dark age, forest passage, or whichever metaphor believers wish to use to conceptualize these putatively benighted times.
“Regime Change” takes Deneen’s argument further, employing a broad range of influences from different eras—from Polybius, the Greek historian of the middle Hellenistic period (a 2nd-century BCE figure whom Deneen appears to place in the Roman imperial era, at one point substituting the word “emperor” for “consuls” in his discussion of Rome’s monarchical power, which was, at the time of Polybius’ writing, embodied by these two elected executives), to 18th and 19th century intellectuals such as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. Deneen uses these thinkers to argue against the pluralistic solution to the problems of liberalism championed by the likes of Michael Lind in his book “The New Class War.” Instead of forcing the current “elites” into a pluralistic compromise with the working class, Deneen suggests embracing an amalgamation of aristocratic and populist sentiments—a concept he terms “aristopopulism.”
As one might expect, such definitions are by necessity fairly loose; the question of “who is a good aristocratic elite and who is a bad professional-managerial class elite,” aside from being a fun parlor game, would likely require an entire library’s worth of texts to answer. Deneen’s use of the term “regime” also carries loaded but fairly expansive connotations. Its usage spiked between 1992 and 2003 and then again from 2011 to 2019, according to Google; the former period likely references a time of imperialist “regime change” in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The latter increase corresponded with the latest rise of the “New Right”—this isn’t the first “New Right,” as 1980s New Righter-er Samuel Francis would remind you, were he still alive—who frequently employed the term to challenge the existing power structures, notably the Global American Empire (GAE) and its aforementioned “elites.”
Of course, Deneen’s work in “Regime Change” should not be held to the same definitional standards as a work of intellectual history, such as Quentin Skinner’s meticulous two-volume “The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,” which combined textual and contextual analysis to elucidate the political thought of Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Instead, Deneen’s book is a manifesto for change, boasting a constellation of ideas drawn from thinkers who might otherwise share little in common, their thoughts borrowed and repurposed to substantiate Deneen’s thesis. This form of argumentation can often raise eyebrows among scholars trained in the Cambridge School methods, as epitomized by Skinner, who critiqued this tendency of drafting historical thinkers into substantiating modern arguments in his essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” Without a combination of textual and contextual clarity, a myriad of loose and unfocused interpretations is possible. One could cite the discrepancy between Greg Weiner’s conception of “Burkean Liberalism” and Deneen’s “non-liberal, favors people” take on Edmund Burke as an exemplar of this unease, given that these arguments, cogent though they might be, nevertheless reduce to the Dude’s dictum in “The Big Lebowski”: “that’s just like, your opinion, man.”
Deneen’s proposed solution to liberalism’s seemingly self-evident failures is an “aristopopulism” led by the newly-minted “self-conscious aristoi who understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, and an equitable social safety net supportive of these goods, constraints upon corporate power, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.” It is a shame that “fascism”—a once-proud term with an intellectual genealogy all its own—has become both a pejorative among leftists, who direct it at anything and everything that offends their sensibilities, as well as a boogeyman that causes people on the far right to clutch their pearls at its invocation, aware that its use by an opponent is likely intended to silence debate (there is a similar fear of the deployment of “racist” against the openly racist right, who consider it a slur and will urge interlocutors to use “race realist” in its stead).
After all, Deneen—certainly no racist or race realist, as his frequent calls for cross-racial solidarity serve to remind us—is forced to employ a host of sophisticated circumlocutions to get around the fact that he is arguing for something akin to what the authors of the 1932 Italian essay “The Doctrine of Fascism“ also wanted: “We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right,’ a fascist century.” Before World War 2 permanently damaged the reputation of fascism and eugenics alike, making them verboten in polite conversation, Italian leader Benito Mussolini—who wrote part of “The Doctrine of Fascism” alongside philosopher Giovanni Gentile—enjoyed a brief stint in the 1920s as a celebrated figure in the United States, an authority figure whose apparent success at restoring order to Italy put him on par with the likes of matinee idol Rudolph Valentino. The fascist-curious American elites of that era would have had no problem putting these simple ideas to an up-or-down vote of the hoi polloi; not so for today, where this old wine must be agonizingly poured into new vessels, onto which confusing labels are thereafter affixed.
Deneen’s propositions aren’t unprecedented; they echo a historical narrative that has been played out before. A comparable model of governance to what he advocates was exhibited in the Estado Novo regime of Portugal—unmentioned in “Regime Change,” despite its pedigree—which lasted from 1926 until the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Portugal’s corporatist political and economic system drew heavily upon the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931). The purpose of these papal encyclicals was not merely to mitigate class struggles but also to subordinate economic concerns to social and cultural values. Despite the theoretical robustness of the corporatist system and the existence of both repressive authority and a social safety net funded in part by colonial exactions, the Estado Novo regime eventually crumbled in 1974 under the weight of a violent decolonizing struggle in Africa that consumed a vast amount of the middle-income country’s annual budget. The change (some might say collapse) of this particular regime left one of Western Europe’s more underdeveloped states in its wake.
Where Deneen might see a bold new “aristopopulist” path that nevertheless has its antecedents, I—like Michael Lind and former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—see a bridge too far. Perhaps this reticence is a byproduct of my personal background, shaped by a fractured vision of the American Dream where everything was always already broken, but to me, the world is not perpetually on the brink of collapse (though we mortal men won’t be leaving this world alive); in fact, some might even argue that the past two centuries have witnessed at least a handful of enduring moral and material advances, even if progress has been far from linear. However, this sense of impending doom has a peculiar charm, especially for those romantic souls yearning for an apocalyptic reckoning—a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience the world’s last night. “Nobody will know when the Son of Man will return,” the Gospel of Matthew tells us, but the easiest way to sell someone on becoming a true believer, as 1920s advertising executive Bruce Barton inadvertently reminds us in “The Man Nobody Knows”—a bestselling and thoroughly risible account of Jesus as marketing genius—is to convince them the good news will be coming true tout de suite. Imminent collapse is nothing if not a durable, evergreen sales tactic.
Curiously, Pat Moynihan’s name is scarcely mentioned in Deneen’s two recent books on the demise of liberalism, despite Moynihan’s eloquence in articulating the precarious yet necessary American strand of the liberal tradition. Moynihan, coming from a broken home of his own and thus boasting a profoundly personal understanding of the necessity for political stability, advocated for an alliance between liberals and their conservative counterparts to preserve democratic institutions from the encroaching forces of the authoritarian left and right. In other words, Moynihan wanted to prevent regime change, something which the American elites (again with that word) have found themselves repeatedly forced to do, in part to protect their own hides, ever since the nation was founded and indeed even before (John Winthrop, cited by Deneen in this book, had an uneasy balancing act in dealing with the religious conservatism and radicalism of mid-17th century Massachusetts).
Moynihan, like Lind and myself, was an unwavering if tormented advocate of American pluralism, indeed citing Edmund Burke to make his point in these 1979 remarks to the United Way of America: “The pluralist position ... is the view held by those who, with Edmund Burke, believe that ... the nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature or to the quality of his affairs. These liberals hold that between the individual and the state is to be found a great and beneficent array of social and economic entities. They believe that in the strength of these voluntary, private associations—church, family, club, trade union, commercial association—lies much of the strength of democratic society.”
Moynihan believed that these voluntary, private associations were a hedge against regime change. Deneen, who also values these voluntary, private associations—especially their Catholic variants—believes that only regime change of the sort outlined in his book can preserve them. Between the two is either a wide gulf of understanding or mere semantics; the text of their works suggests the former, but given Moynihan’s willingness to collaborate with Nixon, the latter would be more likely were it possible for Deneen to parley with the dead politician (Moynihan, after all, was most comfortable with the thoughts of conservatives like Michael Oakeshott and others whom he disagreed with).
That said, one’s reaction to “Regime Change” will depend on their assessment of the state of play: either the sky is falling, or it is not. For that, as jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it in his essay “Natural Law,” much depends on the reader’s disposition: “one’s attitude on these matters is closely connected with one’s general attitude toward the universe…[and] it is determined largely by early associations and temperament, coupled with the desire to have an absolute guide. Men to a great extent believe what they want to—although I see in that no basis for a philosophy that tells us what we should want to want.” I am telling you one thing here and Deneen is telling you another in “Regime Change,” so I would urge you to read his provocative book to make that choice for yourself.
From RealClearWire
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.