Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

  Part of moving toward a postliberal age is recognizing that while liberalism’s initial appeal was premised upon laudatory aspirations, its successes have often been based on a disfigurement of those aspirations. Its defenders often point to the liberation of women from conditions of inequality as a significant example of liberalism’s success, and regard any critique of liberalism as a proposal to thrust women back into preliberal bondage. Yet the main practical achievement of this liberation of women has been to move many of them into the workforce of market capitalism, a condition that traditionalists like Wendell Berry as well as Marxist political theorists like Nancy Fraser regard as a highly dubious form of liberation.1 All but forgotten are arguments, such as those made in the early Republic, that liberty consists of independence from the arbitrariness not only of a king but of an employer. Today we consider the paramount sign of the liberation of women to be their growing emancipation from their biology, which frees them to serve a different, disembodied body—“corporate” America—and participate in an economic order that effectively obviates any actual political liberty. Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount to liberation, but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage.

  Liberalism arose by appeal to an ennobling set of political ideals and yet realized new and comprehensive forms of degradation. Put less charitably, the architects of liberalism intentionally appropriated widely shared political ideals and subverted them to the advantage of those most capable of benefiting from new definitions of liberty, democracy, and republicanism.2 Building on liberalism’s successes means recognizing both the legitimacy of its initial appeal and the deeper reasons for its failure. It means offering actual human liberty in the form of both civic and individual self-rule, not the ersatz version that combines systemic powerlessness with the illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexual license. Liberalism was both a boon and a catastrophe for the ideals of the West, perhaps a necessary step whose failures, false promises, and unfulfilled longings will lead us to something better.

  THE END OF IDEOLOGY

  Liberalism was launched with the claim that it would “take men as they are,” grounding a new politics upon a clear-sighted realism about human nature. Yet its claims about humans “as they are” were premised upon the fiction of radically autonomous humans in a State of Nature. The political, social, and economic order shaped around this disfigured view of human nature succeeded in remaking people in this image, but the project had the predictable effect of liberating them from the reality of relational life. Liberalism has always been animated by a vision of how humans “ought” to live, but it masked these normative commitments in the guise of neutrality. Like its competitor ideologies, it called forth a massive political and economic apparatus to fulfill its vision—in the process both reshaping and damaging humanity. A more humane politics must avoid the temptation to replace one ideology with another. Politics and human community must percolate from the bottom up, from experience and practice.

  One of liberalism’s most damaging fictions was the theory of consent, an imaginary scenario in which autonomous, rational calculators formed an abstract contract to establish a government whose sole purpose was to “secure rights.” This view of consent relegated all “unchosen” forms of society and relationships to the category of “arbitrary” and thus suspect if not illegitimate. Liberalism today has successfully expanded itself from a political project to a social and even familial one, acting most often as solvent upon all social bonds. Yet as liberalism faces more challenging frontiers—especially those religious institutions that fundamentally reject liberal premises—we witness an increasingly visible and active government advancing its project through efforts to control religious and familial practice and belief.3

  Liberalism takes the fundamental position that “consent” to any relationship or bond can be given only when people are completely and perfectly autonomous and individual. Only then are they able to consciously and purposefully engage in forms of utilitarian relationality, and also thereby capable of remaking such bonds when they prove to be unsatisfactory. I recall a chilling conversation when I was teaching at Princeton University about a book that had recently appeared about the Amish. We were discussing the practice of Rumspringa—literally, “running around”—a mandatory time of separation of young adults from the community during which they partake of the offerings of modern liberal society.4 The period of separation lasts usually about a year, at the end of which the young person must choose between the two worlds. An overwhelming number, approaching 90 percent, choose to return to be baptized and to accept norms and strictures of their community that forbid further enjoyment of the pleasure of liberal society. Some of my former colleagues took this as a sign that these young people were in fact not “choosing” as free individuals. One said, “We will have to consider ways of freeing them.” Perfect liberal consent requires perfectly liberated individuals, and the evidence that Amish youth were responding to the pull of family, community, and tradition marked them as unfree.

  Liberalism renders such ties suspect while papering over the ways in which it has shaped its own youth to adopt a particular form of life, set of beliefs, and worldview; these are never subject to appraisal by any standards outside liberalism itself. The traditional culture of the Amish (one can also think of other examples) gives its young a choice about whether they will remain within that culture, but only one option is seen as an exercise of choice. Acquiescence to liberalism, however unreflective, is “tacit consent,” yet membership in a traditional community is “oppression” or “false consciousness.”

  Under this double standard, religious, cultural, and familial membership is an accident of birth. Yet for modern humanity in the advanced West and increasingly the world, liberalism is equally an unwitting inheritance, and any alternatives are seen as deeply suspect and probably in need of liberal intervention. Liberalism further overlooks the way that culture itself is a deeper form of consent. Culture and tradition are the result of accumulations of practice and experience that generations have willingly accrued and passed along as a gift to future generations. This inheritance is the result of a deeper freedom, the freedom of intergenerational interactions with the world and one another. It is the consequence of collected practice, and succeeding generations may alter it if their experience and practices lead to different conclusions.

  The sustenance of existing cultural and religious practices and the building of new communities will require far more conscientiousness than the passive acquiescence now fostered toward liberalism itself. It is an irony (and arguably a benefit of a liberal age) that today it is liberalism itself that silently shapes an unreflective population, and that the development of new cultures is what requires conscious effort, deliberation, reflectiveness, and consent. This is true especially for religious communities in an age in which liberalism has become increasingly hostile to self-imposed limitations and strictures that it finds abhorrent, particularly, but not only, in the domain of personal and sexual autonomy—a stance that many see as betrayal of liberalism rather than its culmination. But this very conflict, by showing the lengths to which liberalism will go to reshape the world in its own image, shows the need for alternative communities and new cultures that will live outside the gathering wreckage of liberalism’s twilight years.

  THE ADVENT OF POSTLIBERAL PRACTICE AND TOWARD A NEW BIRTH OF THEORY

  Already there is evidence of growing hunger for an organic alternative to the cold, bureaucratic, and mechanized world liberalism offers. While especially evident in the remnants of orthodox religious traditions—not only in self-contained communities like the Amish but increasingly in growing international movements of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and others—there is also growing interest in proposals for a “Benedict Option,” most interestingly proposed and explored in the book of that name by Rod Dreher.5 The building up of practices of care, patience, humility, reverence
, respect, and modesty is also evident among people of no particular religious belief, homesteaders and “radical homemakers” who—like their religious counterparts—are seeking within households and local communities and marketplaces to rediscover old practices, and create new ones, that foster new forms of culture that liberalism otherwise seeks to eviscerate.6

  Often called a counterculture, such efforts should better understand themselves as a counter-anticulture. Building a culture in the midst of today’s anticulture is a profound challenge because of the flattened cultural wasteland produced by modern liberalism, as well as its jealous hostility to competitors. A culture is built from the bottom up, and like an organism, it maintains its DNA by passing itself on to subsequent generations. A self-conscious effort to build a new culture exists in basic contradiction to more organic origins and development of cultural practice. Yet the unique context of liberalism’s blighted cultural landscape demands something new. Ironically, given the default choice-based philosophy that liberalism has bequeathed to us, what might someday become a nonvoluntarist cultural landscape must be born out of voluntarist intentions, plans, and actions.

  Such efforts should focus on building practices that sustain culture within communities, the fostering of household economics, and “polis life,” or forms of self-governance that arise from shared civic participation. All such practices arise from local settings that resist the abstraction and depersonalization of liberalism, and from which habits of memory and mutual obligation arise. While culture is cultivated and passed on in the most immediate way in households, it is developed in and through a community of families and centers especially on rituals surrounding birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. Culture takes into account local circumstances, often drawing sustenance and inspiration from facts of local geography and history. It passes memory down through generations via story and song, not the sort packaged in Hollywood or on Madison Avenue, but arising from voices in particular places. And as the word suggests, it is nearly always linked to “cult,” understanding the local to be bound to and ultimately an expression of the universal and eternal, the divine and sublime. Such practices give rise to the only real form of diversity, a variety of cultures that is multiple yet grounded in human truths that are transcultural and hence capable of being celebrated by many peoples.

  A counter-anticulture also requires developing economic practices centered on “household economics,” namely, economic habits that are developed to support the flourishing of households but which in turn seek to transform the household into a small economy. Utility and ease must be rejected in preference to practices of local knowledge and virtuosity. The ability to do and make things for oneself—to provision one’s own household through the work of one’s own and one’s children’s hands—should be prized above consumption and waste. The skills of building, fixing, cooking, planting, preserving, and composting not only undergird the indepen-dence and integrity of the home but develop practices and skills that are the basic sources of culture and a shared civic life. They teach each generation the demands, gifts, and limits of nature; human participation in and celebration of natural rhythms and patterns; and independence from the culture-destroying ignorance and laziness induced by the ersatz freedom of the modern market.

  Along with the arts of household economics is the greater challenge of minimizing one’s participation in the abstract and depersonalizing nature of the modern economy. The skills and dispositions gained in the household should be extended to an economy of households, in which friendships, places, and histories are relevant considerations in economic transactions. An economy that prizes facelessness fosters citizens who cannot see, hear, or speak properly about critical relationships to one another and to the world. Our economy encourages a pervasive ignorance about the sources and destinies of the goods we buy and use, and this ignorance in turn promotes indifference amid an orgy of consumption. Like liberal politics, the economy promotes a concern solely for the short term, hence narrows our temporal horizon to exclude knowledge of the past and concern for the future. Such an economy creates debtors who live for the present, confident that the future will take care of itself while consuming the goods of the earth today in ways that make it less likely that that future ever exists. Local markets, by contrast, foster relations built over time and in place, and necessarily point us beyond individual calculation. Sellers and buyers make their exchanges with an awareness of how their relationships help build a better community, aware that some profit will be reinvested at home for the benefit of friends, neighbors, and generations yet unborn.

  A greater emphasis upon household economics and local exchange must be accompanied by greater political self-governance. Today we measure political health by the percentage of the voting-age population that actually votes, and while this percentage has grown in the past few elections, even this supposed sign of civic health hovers between 50 and 60 percent. Yet the national obsession with presidential electoral politics and the reduction of political conversation and debate to issues arising in the federal government are signs more of civic dis-ease than of health. Politics is reduced largely to a spectator sport, marketed and packaged as a distraction for a passive population. Elections provide the appearance of self-governance but mainly function to satiate any residual civic impulse before we return to our lives as employees and consumers.

  When Tocqueville visited America in the late 1820s, he marveled at Americans’ political do-it-yourself spirit. Unlike his fellow Frenchmen, who were passively acquiescent to a centralized aristocratic order, Americans would readily gather in local settings to solve problems. In the process they learned the “arts of association.” They were largely indifferent to the distant central government, which then exercised relatively few powers. Local township government, Tocqueville wrote, was the “schoolhouse of democracy,” and he praised the commitment of citizens to secure the goods of common life not only for the ends they achieved but for the habits and practices they fostered and the beneficial changes they wrought on citizens themselves. The greatest benefit of civic participation, he argued, was not its effects in the world, but those on the relations among people engaged in civic life: “Citizens who are bound to take part in public affairs must turn from the private interests and occasionally take a look at something other than themselves. As soon as common affairs are treated in common, each man notices that he is not as independent of his fellows as he used to suppose and that to get their help he must often offer his aid to them.”7

  For a time, such practices will be developed within intentional communities that will benefit from the openness of liberal society. They will be regarded as “options” within the liberal frame, and while suspect in the broader culture, largely permitted to exist so long as they are nonthreatening to the liberal order’s main business. Yet it is likely from the lessons learned within these communities that a viable postliberal political theory will arise, one that begins with fundamentally different anthropological assumptions not arising from a supposed state of nature or concluding with a world-straddling state and market, but instead building on the fact of human relationality, sociability, and the learned ability to sacrifice one’s narrow personal interest not to abstract humanity, but for the sake of other humans. With the demise of the liberal order, such countercultures will come to be seen not as “options” but as necessities.

  Still, the impulse to devise a new and better political theory in the wake of liberalism’s simultaneous triumph and demise is a temptation that must be resisted. The search for a comprehensive theory is what gave rise to liberalism and successor ideologies in the first place. Calls for restoration of culture and the liberal arts, restraints upon individualism and statism, and limits upon liberalism’s technology will no doubt prompt suspicious questions. Demands will be made for comprehensive assurances that inequalities and injustices arising from racial, sexual, and ethnic prejudice be preemptively forestalled and that local autocracies or theocracies be legally pre
vented. Such demands have always contributed to the extension of liberal hegemony, accompanied by simultaneous self-congratulation that we are freer and more equal than ever, even as we are more subject to the expansion of both the state and market, and less in control of our fate.

  By now we should entertain the possibility that liberalism continues to expand its global dominion by deepening inequality and constraining liberty in the name of securing their opposite. Perhaps there is another way, starting with the efforts of people of goodwill to form distinctive countercultural communities in ways distinct from the deracinated and depersonalized form of life that liberalism seems above all to foster. As the culmination of liberalism becomes more fully visible, as its endemic failures throw more people into economic, social, and familial instability and uncertainty, as the institutions of civil society are increasingly seen to have been hollowed out in the name of individual liberation, and as we discover that our state of ever-perfected liberty leaves us, as Tocqueville predicted, both “independent and weak,” such communities of practice will increasingly be seen as lighthouses and field hospitals to those who might once have regarded them as peculiar and suspect. From the work and example of alternative forms of community, ultimately a different experience of political life might arise, grounded in the actual practice and mutual education of shared self-rule.

  What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life. Not a better theory, but better practices. Such a condition and differing philosophy that it encourage might finally be worthy of the name “liberal.” After a five hundred–year philosophical experiment that has now run its course, the way is clear to building anew and better. The greatest proof of human freedom today lies in our ability to imagine, and build, liberty after liberalism.