Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

  In effect, liberalism advances most effectively through both classical and progressive liberalisms, the economic liberalism of Locke and the lifestyle liberalism of Mill, even while the two claim to be locked in battle. The destruction of social norms, culture, and the social ecology of supporting institutions and associations is advanced by both the market and the state. Advocates of the former (such as Murray) claim that the resulting deep inequality can be assuaged by moral admonition, while proponents of the latter (such as Putnam) argue that government can substitute for civil society and reconstruct the family that the liberalocracy has eviscerated. Both sides regard generational inequality as an aberration, rather than recognizing it as a key achievement of the liberal order.

  The liberalocracy’s self-deception is, in the main, neither malicious nor devious. Liberalism is arguably the first regime to put into effect a version of the “Noble Lie” proposed by Plato in the Republic, which claimed not only that the ruled would be told a tale about the nature of the regime, but more important, that the ruling class would believe it as well. The “noble lie” proposes a story by which the denizens of the “ideal regime” proposed by Socrates at once believe in their fundamental equality as members of a common family and in the natural basis of their inequality. While Plato proposed the “ideal regime” as a philosophic exercise, liberalism adopted a version of “the noble lie” in order to advance a similarly constituted order, in which people would be led to believe in the legitimacy of inequality backstopped by a myth of fundamental equality. Not only would day laborers be encouraged to believe that their lot in life would continuously improve by their ascent in the advance of the liberal order, but more important, the liberalocrats would be educated in a deep self-deception that they were not a new aristocracy but the very opposite of an aristocratic order. A primary vehicle has been a veneer of social justice and concern for the disadvantaged that is keenly encouraged among liberalocrats from a young age, often at the very educational institutions most responsible for their elevation into the elite. It is often these very same people who, upon encountering the discussion of the “Noble Lie” in the Republic, will pronounce their disgust at such subterfuge, all the while wholly unaware that the Cave they occupy has been rendered invisible by the artificial lighting designed to hide its walls.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Degradation of Citizenship

  THE term “liberal democracy” is widely used to describe the regime that today is regarded by most in the West as the sole legitimate form of political organization. “Liberalism” thus adjectivally coexists with the noun “democracy,” apparently giving pride of place to the more ancient regime form in which the people rule. However, the oft-used phrase achieves something rather different from its apparent meaning: the adjective not only modifies “democracy” but proposes a redefinition of the ancient regime into its effective opposite, to one in which the people do not rule but are instead satisfied with the material and martial benefits of living in a liberal res idiotica. At the same time, the word “democracy” affords legitimation to the liberal regime from a populace whose purported consent stands in for a more robust form of citizenship. A degraded form of citizenship arises from liberalism’s relentless emphasis upon private over public things, self-interest over civic spirit, and aggregation of individual opinion over common good.

  We live in an age in which the ancient suspicion of democracy as a debased and corrupt form of government has been largely forgotten, or when encountered, is regarded as backward, authoritarian, and inhuman. The genius of liberalism was to claim legitimacy on the basis of consent and arrange periodic managed elections, while instituting structures that would dissipate democratic energies, encourage the creation of a fractured and fragmented public, and ensure government by select elite actors. If this were all that liberalism achieved, however, its patina of legitimation would quickly wear thin as a frustrated populace witnessed a growing divide between the claims of democracy and the absence of popular control. Instead, the true genius of liberalism was subtly but persistently to shape and educate the citizenry to equate “democracy” with the ideal of self-made and self-making individuals—expressive individualism—while accepting the patina of political democracy shrouding a powerful and distant government whose deeper legitimacy arises from enlarging the opportunities and experience of expressive individualism. As long as liberal democracy expands “the empire of liberty,” mainly in the form of expansive rights, power, and wealth, the actual absence of active democratic self-rule is not only an acceptable but a desired end. Thus liberalism abandons the pervasive challenge of democracy as a regime requiring the cultivation of disciplined self-rule in favor of viewing the government as a separate if beneficent entity that supports limitless provision of material goods and untrammeled expansion of private identity.

  ANTIDEMOCRATIC LIBERALISM

  Liberalism’s defenders are wont to note the dangers of democracy, particularly the threat of unconstrained majorities over the liberties of minorities. Prominent political observers such as Fareed Zakaria have noted the rise of “illiberal democracy” as a main threat to political stability, rights, and liberal political economy.1 In the wake of the rise of nationalist populist movements such as those throughout Europe that oppose fundamental tenets of the European Union—particularly focused on the effectual elimination of national boundaries—and in the wake of Great Britain’s “Brexit” vote and the election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency, political theorist and Wall Street Journal columnist William Galston devoted a column warning that “the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy; it is illiberal democracy.”2 In the eyes of leading commentators, democracy remains as threatening and unsavory a regime as it did for Plato and Aristotle. While the ancient philosophers typically relegated democracy to the category of “vicious” or “debased” regimes, today’s leading thinkers retain a notional allegiance to democracy only by constraining it within the strictures of liberalism, arguing that liberalism limits the power of the majority and protects freedoms of speech and the press, constitutional checks upon government. They also generally tend to favor fairly open markets and porous national borders, arguing that these arrangements secure prosperity for the nation’s consumers while allowing globalized opportunities of economic mobility and opportunity.

  Democracy is thus an acceptable legitimating tool only as long as its practices exist within, and are broadly supportive of, liberal assumptions. When democratic majorities reject aspects of liberalism—as electorates throughout western Europe and America have done in recent years—a growing chorus of leading voices denounce democracy and the unwisdom of the masses. American elites have periodically assayed the possibility of severely limiting democracy, believing that democracy will undermine policies preferred by experts. In particular, those favoring the expansion of liberalism beyond the nation-state, and thus policies that increase economic integration and the effective erasure of borders, have increasingly become proponents of further constraining democracy. One such authority is Jason Brennan of Georgetown University, who has argued in a book entitled Against Democracy that voters are consistently ill-informed and even ignorant, and that democratic government thus will ultimately reflect the deficiencies of the electorate.3 Other libertarian-leaning liberals such as Bryan Caplan, Jeffrey Friedman, and Damon Root believe that when democracy threatens the substantive commitments of liberalism—which they maintain will be unavoidably the case, since uneducated and uninformed voters are illiberal—it might be better simply to consider ways to jettison democracy.4 Brennan has instead called for rule by an “epistocracy,” a governing elite with tested and proven knowledge to efficiently and effectively govern a modern liberal and capitalist state and social order.

  The positions of these contemporary liberals are hardly new; they echo arguments made by other leading academics during the early part of the twentieth century, when there was growing confidence in the expertise of the administrative s
tate and a dim view of the intellectual capacities of the electorate. In his 1973 book The Crisis of Democratic Theory, Edward A. Purcell masterfully documented the crisis of democratic theory that occurred as a result of early findings in the social sciences. A considerable quantity of early social-scientific data—including the first large-scale intelligence tests administered to a population that was seen as representative of, or even superior to, the average citizen, namely large numbers of troops during World War I—revealed consistently low I.Q. scores among broad swaths of the American populace. A steady stream of similar evidence led a great many leading social scientists of the 1920s and 1930s to call for a wholesale change in government.5

  No less a figure than the 1934 president of the American Political Science Association—Walter J. Shepard—called for a fundamental reconsideration of America’s traditional “faith” in democracy. The best evidence showed that the people were guided not by knowledge and wisdom but by ignorance and whim: “Not the reason alone, but sentiment, caprice, and passion are large elements in the composition of public opinion. . . . We no longer believe that the ‘voice of the people is the voice of God.’”6 Concluding that democracy was indefensible—for reasons similar to those suggested by Brennan, Caplan, Friedman, and others—Shepard urged his fellow political scientists to disabuse themselves of their unjustified faith in the public: the electorate “must lose the halo which has surrounded it. . . . The dogma of universal suffrage must give way to a system of educational and other tests which will exclude the ignorant, the uninformed, and the anti-social elements which hitherto have so frequently controlled elections.”7 Even John Dewey, who had once declared his own “democratic faith,” in a long debate with Walter Lippmann acknowledged that the public was unlikely to be able to rise to the level of civic knowledge and competence demanded in a period of ever more complexity, and suggested that Whitman-like poets would be needed to provide a suitable and accessible “presentation” of the complex political and scientific information needed by the citizenry of a complex modern society.8

  Concern over “democratic competence” of ordinary citizens has given rise not only to explicit critiques of democracy but to efforts to constrain democratic rule even by those who otherwise claim the democratic mantle. By one measure, progressive liberals appear strenuously to endorse democracy, and have been responsible for introducing many measures that increase more direct forms of democratic governance. Belief in greater direct popular control—evinced in such proposals as the initiative, recall, and referendum—were evidence of Progressive Era belief in the wisdom of the multitudes. Calls for education—with Dewey in the lead—were accompanied by claims that “the true Kingdom of God” was on the verge of realization.9

  However, at the same time, a seemingly contradictory urge was evinced by many of the same progressives. Accompanying calls for more democracy were concomitant calls for less popular influence over policy making. Progressives were behind movements for more professionalization in government, above all civil service reform, with accompanying examinations and reduction in the numbers of political appointees within administrations (thereby severing the very electoral connection that progressives elsewhere sought to maximize). Progressives were the great proponents of a growth in government bureaucracy—the professionalization of politics—and the “science” of administration. Progressives were also in the vanguard of the promotion of the social sciences—including especially political science—as the best and most objective means of determining and implementing rational and objectively sound public policy in preference to the passing whims of the electorate. Major figures in the discipline like Woodrow Wilson sought to advance the scientific study of politics in the early years of the twentieth century, laying the groundwork for the rise of social scientific methodology as the necessary replacement of value-laden policy. Early figures in the institution of political science—such as Charles E. Merriam, Harold D. Lasswell, and George E. G. Catlin—called for the scientific study of politics as the prerequisite for objective public policy. “Nothing is more liable to lead astray,” wrote A. Gordon Dewey of Columbia University, “than the injection of moral considerations into essentially non-moral, factual investigation.”10 Popular opinion was understood to give direction to those charged with policy creation. Democracy was thus limited to the expression of preferences, the collection of individual opinions that could then be collated and inform expert crafting of appropriate policy by expert administrators. Elton Mayo—a major social scientist in the 1920s—declared, “A world over, we are greatly in need of an administrative elite.”11 Armed with objective data from the social scientists, a credentialed, bureaucratic elite was expected to take cues from, and at times to lead and direct, irrational and ignorant democratic masses to accept objectively good public policy.

  FOUNDING CONSTRAINTS

  Consistent findings of civic ignorance and incompetence, indifference and misinformation are held by yesterday’s and today’s social scientists to be like the molecular makeup of water or laws of physics: measures of an objective and largely unalterable reality. Ironically, in an age in which science is interested in the ways that human activity is altering some basic assumptions about the natural world—especially climate change—a basic assumption of social science is that measurements of political “competence” are reflections of given facts. A deeper commitment to liberal ends renders such social scientists insensate to the ways that liberalism itself has fostered just such a “citizenry,” that its main aim was to shape a liberal populace shaped primarily by individual interest and commitments to private ends. Whether social scientists conclude from measurements of civic ignorance and indifference that democracy should be jettisoned or that efforts at “civic education” should be increased, the basic assumption is the same: liberalism can correct what most contemporary liberals can’t recognize that liberalism itself created. The ignorance of its own history and aims—the “presentism” of liberals—is one of liberalism’s greatest defenses against recognition that it generates a civic catastrophe that it then claims it must cure by the application of more liberalism.

  The persistent absence of civic literacy, voting, and public spiritedness is not an accidental ill that liberalism can cure; it is the outcome of liberalism’s unparalleled success. It is an aim that was built into the “operating system” of liberalism, and the findings of widespread civic indifference and political illiteracy of past and present social scientists are the expected consequences of a successful liberal order.

  For all of the differences between the progressives and the Framers, there nevertheless exists this striking continuity, at base a shared commitment of their common liberalism: both classical and progressive liberals are dominated by thinkers who praise the rule of the electorate even as they seek to promote systemic governmental features that will minimize electoral influence in the name of good policy outcomes. Indeed, it is curious and perhaps erroneous to debate the “democratic competence” of the American public, given that the system of government explicitly designed by its Framers was not to be democratic. The authors and defenders of the Constitution argued on behalf of the basic law by explicitly rejecting the notion that the Constitution would result in a democracy. They sought to establish a republic, not a democracy. As Madison famously wrote in Federalist 10, “hence it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to perfect equality in their political rights, they would at the same time be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”12

  Madison argued in particular that the dangers of democracies—conceived as small-scale direct democracies (in his mind, roughly corresponding to the size of the smal
lest American states) with a high level of participation by the citizenry—could be avoided by two recourses: first, by “the representative principle” of the new science of politics; and second, by “extending the sphere,” that is, creating a large-scale political entity that would minimize the possibilities for civic combination (“faction”), increase the numbers of interests, and discourage political trust and activity among the citizenry. Even while retaining an electoral connection that would lodge ultimate sovereignty in the people, Madison was clear that representatives should not be excessively guided by the will of the people: the desired effect of representation, he argued, is “to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.”13