Post Liberalism Is In The Air Like Rotten Eggs

 All the solutions to liberalism all strike me as not doing much to promote the freedom which has made the modern world what it is. People complain about The Enlightenment and the Western Tradition, and I wonder if they realize The Enlightenment and the Western Tradition allow them room for their criticism.

Anyway, Andrew Lynn's The New Prince: A not so very different Machiavellianism. in The Hedgehog Review goes after Patrick J. Deneen's ideas for a post-liberalism regime. Mr. Lynn's argument goes as follows:

In Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick J. Deneen offers his contribution to this cause. His starting point is unmistakably Weyrichian: Battered and beaten by adversarial forces, traditional conservatism is in bad shape. The present state of cultural decay, Deneen argues, was hardly offset by post-Obama Republican gains in state offices, the record turnouts of Republican voters in the last two presidential elections, or recent court rulings favoring conservatives—nor will future electoral victories likely turn back the cultural tides. In this assessment, the conservative movement’s blueprint is deeply flawed.

The problems run deeper than policy and court rulings. Fewer people are pursuing traditional goods such as marriage, child rearing, religious participation, and caring for elders. They have instead been taken captive by, in Deneen’s words, the “increasing thralldom to addictions afforded by big tech, big finance, big porn, big weed, big pharma, and an impeding artificial Meta world.” American society has now become hostile to basic human flourishing.
Under such bleak conditions, standard conservative politics offer little hope of relief. Fusionism may be a “dead end,” but Deneen believes it maintains a grip on the right-wing imagination. Conservative party leadership, meanwhile, remains too committed to the fundamental tenets of personal liberty, unregulated markets, and consumerism. This is familiar ground to readers of Deneen, who indicted the corrosive influence of classical liberalism in his remarkably popular 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. Continuing this line of argument, Deneen argues that conservatism bears the mark of liberalism’s undesirable legacy, including especially John Locke’s ideas about individual rights and acquisitive individualism. This has created a Janus-faced ideology that lauds marriage, family, religion, and tradition while at the same time celebrating forces that undermine those practices.

We can thus piece together a straightforward if ultimately incomplete read on Deneen’s project: It is an effort to recover a conservatism untainted by fusionist corruption. Many elements of the book champion reversion to an earlier traditional conservatism. At times echoing the ideas of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, Regime Change expresses concern about the preservation of fundamental human goods sustained by family, community, work, religious beliefs, and institutions. Deneen has made no secret of his general allegiance to traditional gender roles and family structures and the “renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.” His variant of conservatism—what he calls “common good conservatism”—would protect and preserve these ends against the whims of markets or personal choice.
But there’s more going on here. Regime Change’s prognosis is intertwined with class analysis and its own political sociology. Deneen weaves together antimeritocratic critiques by Michael Sandel, Michael Lind, and Christopher Lasch to indict the “managerial class” for its cultivation of acquisitive individualism at the expense of the greater society. The “elites” who make up this class, he avers, embody a hostility to the very goods valorized and celebrated by common good conservatism, goods that make human flourishing possible. Even worse, commitments to identity politics serve as a faux egalitarianism that blinds elites to their aggressive preservation of their own status position and war on the working class. They serve no constituency other than themselves, providing little benefit to those delivery drivers, home health-care providers, childcare workers, and many other service sector employees who make life so convenient for those who are well off.

The common good conservatism advanced in Regime Change declares itself “aligned with the requirements and needs of the working classes” over and against the interests of these elites. Early reviewers of the book, particularly conservatives, recognized this leftward tilt. Deneen endorses labor unions and political movements such as Tory Socialism and Blue Labor. Other elements of Regime Change revive communitarian themes that concerned Deneen’s academic adviser, the political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams. In interviews, Deneen takes pride in his own willingness to move left economically, which he contrasts with progressives’ entrenched resistance to moving to the right socially. Deneen deserves credit for decoupling modern conservatism from its badly dated Cold War political imaginary and for making incisive moral critiques of the self-focused careerism and meritocratic striving now common in contemporary culture. But in delivering its call to action—tellingly appearing in a chapter entitled “What is to Be Done”—Regime Change makes several unexplained turns.

I would start thinking that American conservatives do not have support for their ideas from the majority of Americans. Of course, the conservatives might have noticed that and decided it was time to give up on democracy and just impose their ideas on us.

We might credit Regime Change for delivering on its subtitle: The book manifestly provides one vision of a “postliberal future.” But this is a postliberalism that inherits much from the political conservatism of Weyrich. We see the same guiding worries about cultural decay, here interpreted through more sophisticated historical lineages of thought. We see an almost identical set of political adversaries: leftist campus activists, university administrators, secularists, feminists, cultural Marxists, political correctness advocates, and proponents of identity politics, all intent on destroying our culture. And we see an uncritical pivot from cultural conditions to political responses, responses generally favoring a top-down approach—a “national conservatism” guided by inside-the-beltway think tanks—that places its faith in the righteous to nobly wield coercive forms of state power. As Rod Dreher, one of Deneen’s fellow conservative opinion leaders, put it when interviewed for a 2021 New York Times Magazine piece, postliberals admire regimes such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to the extent to they can serve as a “bulwark against cultural disintegration.”

This postliberalism thus proves to be less Burkean than Machiavellian. Its zero-sum view of power and its focus on elites closely align with the thinking of Italian theorists of power lauded by Trotskyist-turned-conservative James Burnham in his 1943 work The Machiavellians. Such a vision undoubtedly finds a receptive audience within today’s political landscape. But postliberals moving in this direction unfortunately stand to leave behind much of the substantive critiques of the modern liberal order.

Power comes across as the only interest of the Trumpian MAGA politicians. I do not see how they will help the majority of Americans supporting them. I do not see them at all interested in cultural degradation except in cartoonish pronouncements about buns and abortion.

And what is this cultural degradation? Is it the slide from Walter Cronkite to Tucker Carlson? Or is it the rise of professional wrestling and Jerry Springer and Cheaters and Love and Hip Hop?

I do not understand the politics of resentment driving Trump and his followers. I look at them and wonder if they have not earned their places. Anti-Semitism is on the rise - people blaming the Jews for some attainment not reached but which they think t the Jews have taken away from them. I see thumbsuckers throwing temper tantrums for things they never worked for, but which they think are deserved. We need engineers because Americans are too lazy, too self-satisfied, feel too entitled, to make the effort to try for the necessary education.

What, then, are the prospects for a regime change driven by this politics of resentment? The sociologist Daniel Bell, in reflecting on the historical record of social movements, observed that those mesmerized by revolution often prove poorly prepared for the problems of “the day after the revolution.” At that point, abstract moral ideals make a poor match for the mundane world of material needs or simply the desire to pass on privilege to one’s children. It is hard to see how a regime change driven by a desire to seize power from political adversaries would, on finding itself standing above its slain opponent, be any more prepared.

Unfortunately, those who put abstract ideals above humanity are the ones to build gulags and concentration camps.

sch 11/9 

Updated 11/12

From The Article: The need for roots, balance — and a new Enlightenment

 But do we live anymore in an enlightened age, or an age of progress and hope at all? Are today’s  intelligentsia afraid to come forward with their superior insights on this central question, for fear of being branded as insufficiently progressive or class conscious? Are they afraid to ask again what the whole digital upheaval, so far, with its intrusive transparency, its information overload, its identity pressures, its silo separatism, its giant paradoxes of hyper-connectivity and yet fragmenting hyper-individualism, have done to every kind of relationship in society and the nation,  from the humblest to the most international, from  the innermost part of family life to the loftiest aspects of world order?

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The deep mining of intellectual origins to guide us through this predicament is just not happening. Instead we are subjected to a relentless flow of shallow thinking in almost every column, in almost every interview or discussion, but especially on the morning radio shows. The art of the good and informative political discussion, rooted in intellectual integrity and the search for truth,   has truly been lost in a cascade of point-scoring and outright hectoring exchanges, with ceaseless interruptions from over-opinionated but under-informed  interviewers barely allowing answers before they answer their own questions.

I suspect this is one reason for the rise of podcasts, where at least there is a chance of frank and friendly exchange in conversation and something gets learnt, while idiotic yes-or-no questions are usually avoided.  But even here the   banalities keep surfacing and flooding out  serious reflection as to why things should be as they now are, or are plainly becoming.

Why, for example,  the  atmosphere of total distrust of all the apparatus of governance? Why the  lack of trust, lack of respect, lack of patience, lack of  belief? Why the lack of the binding agents which hold  the centre together strongly enough to contain dissent but preserve a reasonable degree of social and national unity?

This is  the glue of association and identity that has gone, leaving  the fragments to proliferate and scatter. But if no-one stops to ask why,  especially now, why we are so clearly moving not into a new age of Enlightenment but out of one — with evidence of a slide back to mysticism, superstition, paranoia, mindless crime, repression and incipient madness — then there can be no lasting repairs and no recovery. We cannot address  the key points of weakness, with no check  on the disintegrating slide, and no progress – in fact the opposite.