I’ll stop being tongue and cheek. If you don’t know, postliberalism, or national conservatism, or the New Right (which is capitalized?) is an intellectual movement that, in essence, claims we have too much freedom. In the economy, this has led to a brutal, winner-take-all system based on waste and alienation. In social life and culture, decades of focus on individualism and freedom from constraint have left us bereft of community, deep and committed relationships, and a culture that is invigorating and inspiring. In government, the promise of limit and restraint has degenerated to a state that is increasingly therapeutic, expansive, and impossible to decipher for all but the expert. The confluence of such trends has produced a society of wealthy, globe-trotting elites who dogmatically defend liberalism’s tenets and an underclass of stagnant, frustrated, and lonely citizens, upon whom elites must enforce liberal orthodoxies. The postliberal solution to these problems is a rejection of the “anthropological individualism” that underpins the liberal order, a recognition of the need for restraint, and a return to tradition.

The postliberal movement has books, Substacks, podcasts, and a conference. J. D. Vance, who is running for Senate in my beloved Ohio, has spoken at events with a postliberal tinge to them. Peter Thiel speaks highly of postliberal intellectuals. The movement arguably has memes as well. But what, really, do postliberals claim about the world? More importantly, what do they want to do about it?

Summary

In this post I lay out and assess the main claims, as I see them, of the emerging intellectual and political movement called postliberalism. I do this mainly in the form of a review of Patrick Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed. I do not take the book to be indicative of what all postliberals think, but it is well-received in postliberal (online) circles, and Deneen writes fo The Postliberal Order. So I think it is representative of the movement.

While I am sympathetic to some of the claims Deneen makes, I conclude that Deneen (1) mistakes liberal models for liberal beliefs, (2) understates the benefits of liberalism, (3) conflates technological change and liberal ideology, and (4) ignores compelling solutions that can be carried out in liberal societies. I remain skeptical that Deneen’s proposals are really something wholly apart from liberalism, and I gesture toward solutions that may remedy the problems he laments.

(Yes, Tyler Cowen and Noah Smith have both beat me to talking about this and leveling similar critiques. I swear I started writing before either post came out!)

The Self-Defeating Nature of Liberalism

Liberalism promises greater personal choice, material prosperity, and political liberty. In Deneen’s view, present-day liberalism has inhibited these goals. But it has not only failed in reaching its aspirations. It has failed precisely because it was so successful:

Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has “become more fully itself,” as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradiction manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology.

The failings of liberalism, to Deneen, are manifest in liberalism’s corruption of culture, technology’s failure to free us from the constraints of nature, the increasing irrelevance of the liberal arts, the rise of a “new aristocracy” in the economy and in politics, and the degradation of citizenship and public life. All sides of the political spectrum seem to agree that American society has chronic social pathologies like loneliness, social and economic rigidity, and the lack of an animating sense of purpose. But the mechanism by which these processes have occurred is what is under debate. For Deneen, liberalism as an ideology is to blame.

In the book’s first two chapters, Deneen argues that liberalism rests on false assumptions and is self-contradictory. He devotes the remaining chapters to the problems wrought by liberalism in culture, technology, education, the economy, and politics, which I summarize below.

False Liberal Assumptions

To understand the profundity of Deneen’s claims, you must understand precisely what he is rejecting. Deneen believes contemporary pathologies are not merely the result of sixties counterculture, the sexual revolution, or “neoliberal” economics. Instead, he argues that the fault lies in the entirety of the liberal project, from Hobbes and Locke to the Founding Fathers to John Dewey to what we would call the “woke”. Particularly, liberal philosophers and the liberal societies they gave birth to commit two fundamental errors in their beliefs about human nature: “1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature.”

Deneen rejects a core premise of modern political theory and economics: namely, that humans are rational, autonomous, utility maximizing agents. The theory is that humans have preferences and, given a set of choices, will select the option that most satisfies these preferences. In politics, this is the social contract. While we are naturally free, we voluntarily renounce this freedom to escape from an anarchic and violent “state of nature” and join a state, either a Hobbesian absolute monarchy or a Lockean liberal state. In economics, we are consumers who rationally allocate our scarce resources to the optimal (utility or happiness-maximizing) bundle of goods and services.

In liberal politics and economics, relationships among autonomous agents are “increasingly dependent on whether those relationships have been chosen, and chosen on the basis of their service to rational self-interest” (32). The problem, Deneen argues, is that liberalism is not a neutral descriptor of human behavior, but an education in a particular way of seeing the world. Liberalism encourages people to to think of their relationships not as obligations, commitments, or part of what constitutes “the Good,” but as temporary transactions to be discarded if they fail to satisfy self-interest. It undermines not only tyrannical political arrangements, but also “arbitrary” cultural traditions that impinge on the autonomy of the individual. In Deneen’s words, “liberalism encourages loose connections” (34).

Deneen also criticizes an essential, though “less visibly political,” premise of liberal ideology and society: that humans are separate from nature and should, through science and technological progress, control, master, and exploit the natural world. Whereas premodern thinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas believed humans to play a fixed role in a comprehensive natural order, liberal thinkers, from Bacon to contemporary transhumanists, believe in manipulating the natural world for human gain. More radically, some liberal thinkers reject the notion of a fixed human nature and aspire to moral progress via science and technology.

To Deneen, the degradation of the environment and the rapid depletion of resources is only the most obvious consequence of this view. Indifference to nature also manifests in the form of “liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies,” disregarding any sense of nature as something fixed, immutable, and transcendent (37).

Individualism and Statism

These two revolutions in thought constitute a rejection of “the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires” (37). Thus liberalism is not merely a political project aimed at limited government and juridical rights, but an attempt to transform human life and the natural world. This view is foundational to Deneen’s claims. Liberalism, Deneen argues, has ideological goals no less than fascism or communism do. It seeks to promote, often via the state, modes of living that are in accordance with individualist conceptions of human nature and the assumption that nature exists for human exploitation.

But these assumptions undermine the communities that sustain social animals like humans, thus requiring the state to pick up the slack. Paradoxically, the role of the liberal state comes encompass both (1) the promotion of liberal values and (2) the repression of the ill effects emerging from human beings without community, positive moral codes, and the guidance of tradition. This reliance on the state ultimately undermines liberalism’s promises of greater freedom, prosperity, and equality. It is worth quoting Deneen at length:

If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-defeating and that it culminates in the twin depletions of moral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied, then we face a choice. We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice, or suffer by default an oscillation between growing anarchy and the increasingly forcible imposition of order by an increasingly desperate state.

In liberal society, state surveillance, coercion, and control replace earlier, informal mechanisms of preserving social order: local customs, religious traditions, and moral education. Despite their superficial differences, both progressives and conservatives contribute to the undermining of these traditional forms of social organizations. Conservatives do so through expansion of the free market into ever more areas of life, while liberals deploy the regulatory and judicial power of the federal government to undo “oppressive” social arrangements. Deneen rejects the labels “conservative” and “liberal”, preferring “classical liberal” and “progressive liberal,” underscoring his view that liberal society offers no real alternatives to liberalism, despite its emphasis on choice.

The consequence of liberalism’s assault on traditional, local practices is that “deracinated human beings seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining to them: the state” (60). Hence our contemporary self-definition through political labels, rather than, for instance, regional or religious ties.1 At its worst, the alienation brought about by liberal modernity is breeding ground for totalitarian ideologies that offer the sense of identity, purpose, and community that liberalism does not. While we may not have sunk to such depths yet, our increasingly rancorous politics do not exactly portend a brighter future. At the very least, a gradual expansion of the authority of an impersonal market or the therapeutic "kludgeocracy" that is the state seems more likely.

Problems Wrought By Liberalism

Liberalism’s false assumptions and self-contradictions make themselves manifest in several contemporary problems. Attributing these problems to liberal ideology and practice make up the bulk of the book. I will review Deneen’s view of these problems, to each of which he dedicates a chapter, here.

Liberalism as Anticulture

Like many a scuzzy leftist French intellectual before him, Deneen decries liberalism’s tendency to eviscerate local, particular cultures such that what remains is not a liberal monoculture, but the negation of culture itself, an anticulture. Sets of “generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and particular settings” are replaced by participation in desultory patriotic spectacles and depersonalized market transactions:

The liturgies of nation and market are woven closely together (the apogee of which is the celebration of commercials during the Super Bowl), simultaneously nationalist and consumerist celebrations of abstracted membership that reify individuated selves held together by depersonalized commitments. (64-65)

Such a bleak scenario arises from the "three pillars of liberal anticulture,” namely 1) human conquest of nature, 2) presentism, a conception of time in which the past is irrelevant and the future is a foreign land, and 3) a political order that renders place irrelevant. These liberal ideas offer a radically different conception of nature, time, and place — one that Deneen argues is out of touch with human nature and responsible for much of our social and cultural anomie.

Deneen condemns a the pantheon of liberal thinkers (again, in a strangely leftist sounding way) for attempting to overcome natural limits and to subject nature to rational, technocratic organization usually aimed at maximizing production. These attitudes have caused most humans in developed liberal societies to become out of touch with the natural world and for nature itself to become degraded, standardized, and without the resilience it had before human monoculture. (See chapter 8 of Scott’s Seeing Like a State for a nearly identical argument).

Degradation of the natural world also reflects a corrupted liberal attitude toward time: one in which the past is irrelevant, the future is unknowable, and the present is all that counts. Individuals in liberal society perceive “fractured time” in which any notion of trusteeship, of inheritance of the past and an obligation to care for future generations is shattered. Thus the liberal citizen is able to pursue hedonism, the liberal corporation to pollute, and the liberal state to spend lavishly.

Finally, anticulture exhibits a “fungible” attitude toward place. You’re familiar with this argument if you’ve been to an international airport: Paris is New York is Shanghai is Dubai, and all are nowhere and everywhere. You know how things work. You know how McDonald’s tastes and what luxury jewelry at the duty free shop is high status and which is kitschy. There is no need to adapt, except in trivial ways, to differences in custom and organization. In pre-liberal societies, communities were, “a rich and varied set of personal relationships” rooted in place and thus not “portable, mobile, fungible, or transferable” (78). Liberalism has eradicated such diversity of customs, attitudes, and bonds as it has expanded the reach of abstract notions of political rights and market transactions.

Bereft of the communities, customs, and places that orient us, citizens in liberal society look to the authority of the state and the caprices of the market to fill the void. But the abstract and impersonal state cannot fill the needs of particular human beings and instead must resort to therapeutic and increasingly authoritarian forms of control to maintain a social order that was once preserved by local knowledge and customs.

Technology and the Loss of Liberty

As something of a crotchety technophobe myself, I found myself nodding in agreement while reading this chapter, which argues that technology and our obsession with it has become more a source of imprisonment than liberation. Deneen and the writers he cites (Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, Neil Postman, among others) argue that our technologies are not so much neutral tools for whatever aims we choose to deploy them, but independent forces. Technology has its own logic, and it reshapes society, often for the worse. The internet and social media, whatever benefits they may have brought, seem to be making us more distracted, more lonely, and more bereft of community. Or at least they have not done much to improve these problems, despite earlier expectations. Further, the development of technology proceeds in such a way that nobody really consents to it, at least not in a meaningful way. A more free and just society would ask not, “Is this more efficient/better/more powerful/faster,” but, “Will this or won’t it support the fabric of our community?”

Until we learn to ask the latter question (and to reject technology when the answer is, “No”), our technological culture will lead us "ineluctably into a condition of bondage to the consequences of our own fantasy” (109).

Liberalism Against the Liberal Arts

The liberal arts are liberal because they are thought to make a person free. The word comes from the Latin liberalis, meaning of freedom, or pertaining to or befitting a free person. The original sense of liberal suggests not just autonomy and freedom from constraint, but a control of one’s lower desires, self-knowledge, and a an open mind. The liberal arts originated to cultivate these such habits through deep engagement with canonical texts such as the Bible, classical literature and philosophy, and, later, vernacular literature. Such an education equipped a man, typically an aristocrat, with the habits of mind suitable for a life of rent seeking and merciless exploitation of the peasantry. Uh, I mean, responsibility. Gradually, as more and more of the West’s population began to do something other than plow fields and die, liberal education expanded, enfolding ever more students into its seminars and reading lists.

Liberalism has at last degraded all that, Deneen argues. Today, the liberal arts are under assault from various directions, all in the name of expanding individual choice and freedom from constraint. On all sides of the political spectrum, there is the emphasis on vocational training or STEM, which “advance the practical and effectual experience of autonomy” by enhancing employment prospects at the expense of the humanities and the liberal arts (111). Then, within the (overwhelmingly progressive liberal) academy itself, humanities professors, aspiring to the rigor of their scientific peers, undertake analysis informed by “theory” to demonstrate that the traditional canonical texts are irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, etc., and thus cannot teach us much. The university, once a place of self-discovery and lofty intellectual ambition, is now largely a bureaucratic process. You receive a degree that will prepare you for a job while also acculturating yourself to the liberal elite class.

The New Aristocracy

And once students get those degrees, what do they do with them? Deneen writes:

Such students embrace “identity” politics and “diversity” to serve their economic interests, perpetual “potentiality” and permanent placelessness. The identities and diversity thus secured are globally homogenous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify with other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms of globalized indifference toward shared fates of actual neighbors and communities. (132).

But the primary recipient of Deneen’s critique in this chapter is not Ivy League students, but John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian philosopher and early advocate of liberalism. Deneen’s takes issue with “the Millian principle that ‘everything is allowed’, as least as long as it does not result in measurable (mainly physical) harm” (148). The issue with this, according to Deneen, is that such liberation from custom and traditional norms undermine the fabric of society that allow ordinary people to flourish. Liberal autonomy works well for those “who are best provisioned by disposition (nature), upbringing (nurture), and happenstance” to succeed in a world bereft of institutional and traditional supports, but it fails everyone else (150). Thus elites largely secede from the societies they rule over, cloistering themselves in wealthy cities, interacting only with the well-educated, and securing advantages for their children. Those who do not succeed in such a system face crumbling families, rising drug and alcohol abuse, and social isolation.

The Degradation of Citizenship

Liberalism’s emphasis on an autonomous citizenry which consents to a limited state fails, in Deneen’s view, because it degrades the practice of virtuous citizenship. Its’ “relentless emphasis upon private over public things, self-interest over civic spirit, and aggregation of individual opinion over common good” (157). Deneen critiques the tradition, rooted in the social sciences, of deriding “illiberal democracy, ” a practice in which “the people” systematically prefer illiberal outcomes. To liberals, the emphasis in liberal democracy is, unsurprisingly, on “liberal”: free markets, limited government, and freedom from tradition. To illiberal democrats, the emphasis is on “democracy,” a system where the people rule.

Deneen admits that many predictable forms of illiberal democracy, such as authoritarian strongmen who promise to protect the people from “the vagaries of liberalism” are undesirable (178). He argues that the rise of illiberal strongmen is attributable (once more) to liberalism itself. Liberalism has uprooted the traditional practices of self-rule described by Tocqueville, in which local governance and administration was carried out by citizens bound by tradition. In its place, citizens are “degraded” by the uncontrollable and unknowable forces of government, the economy, technology, and globalization. All of which lead citizens to resent their growing powerlessness over the direction of society and calls for an authoritarian restoration of the former social order.

Solution: The Postliberal Order

Deneen’s solutions to the above problems requires recognizing them not as “discrete problems solvable by liberal tools but a systemic challenge arising from pervasive invisible ideology” (179). From there, Deneen posits three steps that liberal societies can take to rise out of their ideological stupor:

1. Acknowledge the achievements of liberalism and suppress the desire to return to a pre-liberal society.

2. Outgrow our ideological preoccupations by developing “practices that foster new forms of culture, household economics, and polis life” (183).

3. Generate a new theory of politics and society based on experimentation and practice.

In the anarchist fashion, Deneen is weary of providing more concrete solutions, urging us to first adopt, “Not a better theory, but a better practice” (197). He praises religious groups that pursue the “Benedict Option” of forming deliberate communities with an emphasis on traditions new and old, organic social engagement, and community control of social and political life. In the economy, Deneen emphasizes home economics, craft, and the stewardship of resources over the depersonalized and selfish nature of the liberal market economy. Now that liberalism has run its course, we can begin to undertake such practices, reaping the benefits of liberal freedom, but ultimately constructing something new and better.

What I Liked

As a Gen-Zer (or, zoomer, for those of you who are very online) it does seem that my generation is especially sad, anxious, and adrift, perhaps as a result of the anomie wrought by liberalism. For young Americans, life often takes on the character of a Michel Houellebecq novel:

…it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality: we had simplified and pruned so much, broken so many barriers, taboos, misplaced hopes, and false aspirations; truly, there was so little left.

I sometimes read comments on the internet along the lines of “Don’t let society tell you what to do! Not everyone needs a nine-to-five, a spouse, and a white-picket-fence house in the suburbs!”. I find this advice rather passé. It seems like the dominant cultural message, at least in my milieu, is one of great indifference to the sort of life one leads. There seems to be little in the way of institutional encouragement to do anything other than whatever makes you feel good. For some this is a noble, selfless vision. You might be inspired to live a life of tranquility, harmony with society and nature, and virtuous conduct. But perhaps this indifference just makes it easier to spend all your time on shopping, browsing Reddit, or watching porn.

I agree with many of the broad strokes of the book: limits and restraint, strong social ties and community, and deep engagement with a cultural tradition are all good things. Unlimited material desire, frittering away our lives on technological diversions, social stratification, and cultural homogenization are all bad things. I also think liberalism, broadly construed, is at least somewhat responsible for growing social atomization and that the center, as it stands, cannot hold. I am skeptical of the state’s ability to carry out what were once solely the duties of family, church, and community. I won’t go into too much detail about what I agree with, as it risks rehashing the arguments Deneen makes above. Instead, I’ll go into…

What I Didn’t Like

Deneen is a one voice among many, on the left and right, describing our social woes. This is not a worthless task. To give name to our ineffable misgivings and discontents is worthwhile. But the more important and more difficult task is to offer a compelling case for why such woes exist and to propose reasonable fixes. Here I think Deneen is lacking. Particularly, I think Deneen’s argument is flawed because it:

#1: Mistakes liberal models for liberal beliefs, and does not recognize updates to those models

When I was reading Hobbes and Rousseau in an undergraduate philosophy class, I was struck by how ridiculous their depiction of the state of nature seemed. We know now that humans are social creatures and probably have been for most of our evolutionary history. The “state of nature” was not a war of all against all (but it could have been a war of all small bands against all small bands). Similarly, Econ 101 lectures on consumer behavior offer simplified characterizations of humans.

But throwing out liberal philosophy on the basis of these “errors” is a bit of an overreaction. These are models designed to shed light on the formation of legitimate states or how the economy works. And, as the adage has it, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” “Anthropological individualism” is a model, not a precise description of human nature.

But Deneen argues that liberal ideology is the pernicious force.Ideologies, I agree, can be harmful, especially if they make lots of false claims and force people into believing them. It is indeed bad if liberalism promotes selfishness and indifference to the well-being of others. But in the case of political philosophy, we have long surpassed Hobbes and Locke in describing human nature: we have psychology, neuroscience, and biology for that now, which all tell us that yes, we do need other people. In economics, the aim was never to completely describe all aspects of human nature. It was to model economic behavior. And modern economics, while imperfect, has done quite well.

(Aside: as for the claim Deneen makes (in passing) that economics courses, “influence students to act more selfishly”: well, that’s an empirical question, and the evidence seems mixed. This paper is suggestive that such a claim is true. While I have not done a thorough literature review, the typical ways of investigating this question seem streetlight-effecty to me.)

#2 Understates the benefits of liberalism

Liberal societies are among the wealthiest, healthiest, and happiest places in the world. Deneen urges that we recognize this, I admit. But even if you think liberal ideology has reached its terminus, you have to admit that a secular belief system which delivered pretty amazing growth, technological achievements, and reductions in violence, poverty, and illness for nearly five hundred years must have something going for it. Other belief systems have failed to deliver anything remotely similar, with the exception of authoritarian countries that saw rapid economic growth, such as South Korea in the mid-twentieth century and China for the past few decades. But even these countries adopted elements of liberal philosophy: namely, the market.

Further, the classical notions of liberty which Deneen praises were for all but a tiny elite. The regulation of baser desires was necessary only for those who could reasonably expect to indulge those desires. But most people, for most of recorded history, did not have anything close to this option. And liberal ideas are largely to thank for that no longer being the case. It was arguably worth embracing a more individualistic philosophy because it led to extraordinary improvements in things almost all humans care about: not dying at a young age, not being sick, and not having to do backbreaking labor for most of your waking hours. If the claim is that these beliefs have run their course, that’s fine. But I think we ought to be weary, given Chesterton’s fence, of throwing out the only belief system in all of human history that enabled an escape from poverty.

#3: Conflates technological change and liberal ideology

The Scientific Revolution and liberal philosophy are closely related, and liberal notions of progress invariably connote technological advancement. But it is unfair to blame problems that stem from our inability to adapt to technological change on liberal philosophy. It’s possible to think the problems of digital media (the supposed “dumbing down” of public discourse, the isolation, envy and narcissism social media produces, and the increasingly incomprehensible nature of a reality mediated and created by digital imagery) are analogous to the early days of industrialization. For many years, industrialization was quite miserable for much of the working class. But by the mid-twentieth century, workers received a much better deal: a forty hour work week, a house in the suburbs, and a hefty pension from GM.

I think we are in a similar position to the early industrial laborers with regard to technology. Digital technology has brought transformative benefits, but also unexpected costs. The key is not to throw out the internet and social media, but to find ways of reigning in and harnessing these technologies to allow us to live satisfying, focused, and autonomous lives. I think we need not a halt on the techno-scientific worldview, but a Cal Newport style wisdom about technology. At its current stage, the movement to retain focus, deep thinking, and real social connections in a world of digital distraction and atomization is highly individualistic. But we could redesign social structures and incentives that encourage us to use technology in the service of our nobler ends, rather than our current state of somewhat being ruled by technology. I find it encouraging that Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brians, which Deneen cites, is largely a summary of scientific findings on neuroplasticity. Who better to cast a skeptical eye on the scientific and technological enterprise than scientists themselves?

Another point, while not related to technological change per se, but to the scientific worldview in general, is the issue of religious decline. Certainly, traditional religious organizations provided community, spiritual nourishment, and moral guidance. Why would anyone want to give that up? Deneen does not directly address this issue but implies that liberal ideology is at fault, with its autonomous conception of human nature and hostility to tradition.

I think a simpler explanation is more likely, but it would weaken Deneen’s case, so he doesn’t include it: a lot of people just don’t think religious claims are true. 22% of Americans claim not to be affiliated with any religion. Only 33% of Americans attend church or a synagogue weekly or almost every week. I think this latter statistic is more telling. You can believe in God but not go much further than that, and I suspect many people are in this camp. They answer that they are “religious” in a poll, but aren’t too convinced that means that they have to pray, go to Church, or follow religious texts (which often seem more like the morals humans of 2,000 years ago would have espoused rather than those of an omniscient and omnipotent God ). While we might bemoan the absence of communities religion once provided, we can’t consider this apart from the often implausible, contradictory, and bizarre claims religions proffer.

What would Deneen say to those who agree with his argument, but do not believe in God? “Just bite the bullet, pretend to believe, and return to the harmony of participating in religious tradition”? No matter how much they crave community and moral conduct, I think a large fraction of society has permanently lost connection with traditional religious teachings.

#4: Ignores solutions that can be provided under liberalism

Postliberals often claim that the elites have abandoned the rules of the game. Elite institutions enforce conformity to liberal mores, rather than act as neutral arbiters among competing sets of values. Even if this is true and institutions really are completely rotten, what are we to do? Violent revolution is one answer, but if the Trump and Sanders phenomena have proved anything, it’s that outsiders and anti-establishment figures can succeed in entering the establishment and changing its policies. As for the problems Deneen wants to fix, I think there are solutions that do not require us to take off our liberal ideological goggles.

Deneen wants to create communities to practice old traditions, establish new ones, and develop a political philosophy from practice. How is this not possible within liberal states? Or at least not theoretically possible? Is the fear that the state is so hollowed out and committed to liberal ideology that it would intervene? Or that the market would make this de-facto impossible? There are certainly barriers to starting new communities, but why could these not be overcame by electoral politics or public policy? Why not, for instance, make it easier for Americans to move (which is really hard) so that like-minded people could cluster together. Or why not reduce zoning requirements in our wealthiest cities, lowering rents in and enabling people other than wealthy elites to live in them? Why not divest power away from the federal government, and toward local communities? Why not move away from our absolutist conception of rights and give traditions and communities a bit more of a say? Why not do something even weirder, like network states, UBI, or quadratic voting and funding?

A few years ago, Scott Alexander wrote of a fictional archipelago in which various groups and subcultures could found communities according to their values:

Imagine a new frontier suddenly opening. Maybe a wizard appears and gives us a map to a new archipelago that geographers had missed for the past few centuries. He doesn’t want to rule the archipelago himself, though he will reluctantly help kickstart the government. He just wants to give directions and a free galleon to anybody who wants one and can muster a group of likeminded friends large enough to start a self-sustaining colony.

And so the equivalent of our paleoconservatives go out and found communities based on virtue, where all sexual deviancy is banned and only wholesome films can be shown and people who burn the flag are thrown out to be eaten by wolves.

And the equivalent of our social justiciars go out and found communities where all movies have to have lots of strong minority characters in them, and all slurs are way beyond the pale, and nobody misgenders anybody.

Obviously some difficulties will arise, and I encourage you to read to whole post, which addresses many of them. I imagine Deneen would accuse me of offering ever more liberalism to address the problems of liberalism. But I can’t see how he proposes anything different, other than allowing the focus of society to be the community instead of the individual. So perhaps the liberal state ought to err more on the side of protecting communities (to reduce the atomization wrought by liberalism) while still providing individualist protections (exit clauses, freedom of association, etc). Communitarianism can exist within liberal states as a positive expression of what is good, while liberalism provides the architecture that sets the broad limits of government and the market.

Other solutions seem bad. If liberalism is beyond all hope and founding new communities within liberal states is impossible, what options do we have left? RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) ? Leninist revolution to restore traditional communities or create postliberal ones? Settling for cottagecore aesthetics while still toiling under liberalism? I think there is much more inspiring thinking on what the future could look like than what Deneen offers. And it will require us to accept a largely liberal framework, even if we move the needle in a more communitarian direction.