The Communitarian Consensus: A Leftist Review of Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
Liberalism isn't dead yet, but somebody is about to kill it
Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered. The liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life, while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrollable power, one that only extends their sense of powerlessness by relentlessly advancing the project of globalization. The only rights that seem secure today belong to those with sufficient wealth and position to protect them, and their autonomy-including rights of property, the franchise and its concomitant control of the representative institutions, religious liberty, free speech, and security in one’s papers and abode- is increasingly compromised by legal intent or technological fait accompli.
The economy favors a new meritocracy that perpetuates its advantages through generational succession, shored up by an educational system that relentlessly sifts winners from losers. A growing distance between liberalism’s claims and its actuality increasingly spurs doubts about those claims, rather than engendering trust that the gap will be narrowed.
Liberalism has failed, not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.
-Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed
My last essay was a critique of right-wing demagoguery, an insistent and disturbing historical trait of reactionary movements. But one of the conceits of Bracero is my conviction that there is quite a bit within the right’s intellectual tradition that has merit, and much of the left’s current failure can be credited to its dogmatic and lazy unwillingness to engage in a good-faith dialectic with that tradition.
Along those lines, reading Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen is almost a requirement for engaging in mature political discourse in the US today, and it was a unique pleasure in many respects. Very little of what Deneen says in the book is new to me, and his deeply reactionary conclusion-less explicit within the book itself than in Deneen’s other media-is an image of a world I decidedly do not wish to live in. But what is so fascinating is to see how his traditionalist communitarianism and the left wing communalism I’m most influenced by come to such broadly similar conclusions, both about the problems and their solutions, from completely different points of departure. To better define and articulate what we on the left mean when we discuss the creation of new forms of communal life, we could do far worse than to begin by contrasting our project, and our philosophy, with the likes of Deneen’s.
The book’s title-Why Liberalism Failed-certainly has a clickbaity feel, something one would expect from a Dinesh D’Souza or Ann Coulter paperback destined to rot on the shelves of your local Savers. But it is also accurate to the book’s thesis-unlike more schlocky conservative authors, Deneen (at least in the book) is not here to argue that liberals have twisted the Enlightenment-era political philosophy of the Founding Fathers, as has been attempted by self-styled “Classical Liberals.”
Rather, there are large sections of the book which are genuinely indistinguishable from a polemic written by the likes of Noam Chomsky or David Graeber, arguing that the founders actively wanted to suppress democracy, dividing the populace of the new United States such that they would unthinkingly assent to the rule of an elite central authority, and come to have more faith in it than in their own communities, and ultimately their own families.
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 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.”
Liberalism, with its centrality of the supposed freedom of the individual through a social contract tacitly made with the state, hasn’t been perverted-rather, it has run its course, and where we are now is more or less the only place liberalism’s central conceits could have ever led us-to its failure.
Declaring the present failure, and particularly the imminent death of liberalism, is risky, and feels as if it could easily be looked back on in ten years with the same mocking disapprobation Francis Fukayama’s The End of History currently suffers. As Deneen acknowledges, of the three political ideologies which have characterized the modern era, liberalism is the sole survivor, and its capitalist engine has proven remarkably resilient to stress. But in truth, Deneen is not writing about how liberalism is dying, so much as why we ought to kill it.
The Autonomous Individual
While Deneen’s critiques of liberalism are many, all seem to stem from a central argument-a disagreement over the meaning of liberty, and the role virtue plays in it. More precisely, that both the traditional conservative and progressive movements are in fact liberal, in the sense that they agree that freedom is to be defined in terms of individual autonomy, but they relegate that autonomy to different areas: the conservatives (classical liberals) to economic freedom, and progressives (progressive liberals) to social standards and civil rights. As a result, conservatives champion a strong free market, whereas progressives champion a strong state to protect individuals, and the two conflict over every issue along these lines-but both derive their core commitments from liberalism.
Both classical and progressive liberalism ground the advance of liberalism in individual liberation from the limitations of place, tradition, culture, and any unchosen relationship. Both traditions-for all their differences over means-can be counted as liberal because of this fundamental commitment to liberation of the individual, and to the use of natural science, aided by the state, as the primary means for achieving practical liberation from nature’s limitations. Thus, statism and individualism grow together, while local institutions with respect for natural limits diminish.
Deneen dismisses both of these, arguing that in truth the left and right represent a liberal consensus that is only superficially divided. Both merely advance differing aspects of the liberal project, operating from the same prior assumptions about individual human autonomy, and the role played by the state in defending it. More precisely, they derive their ideas about individual autonomy from the thought experiments about man in a state of nature to be found in the works of Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau.
But the state of nature really is just that-a thought experiment, and a spurious one at that. Deneen doubtless has a point-a version of freedom and liberty that conceives itself in relation to trying to preserve or renew this state of nature, which tries to liberate a person from all social and cultural boundaries and duties, is a version of liberation that far more often leaves people bereft, lacking precisely the rich web of intergenerational relationships, with all their attendant responsibilities and expectations, which give people a stable sense of self. This is degraded not just by cultural, but also material changes along the lines of liberal development-we no longer need one another, except in the most abstract sense.
In the language of Lionel Trilling, which I often refer back to in these essays, liberalism constitutes the shift from sincerity, in which people are given social roles to conform themselves to, to authenticity, in which each person is an autonomous individual seeking to discover or most fully express their true, inner self-their state of nature, if you like. Such an identity framework by definition cannot allow for tradition, and gives an ever shrinking space for responsibility to one’s family or community. It only limits itself by the social contract it establishes with the state, which exists precisely to protect the liberty of people to pursue their authentic selves. As Deneen argues in the book, “From the perspective of liberalism, it is a virtuous circle. But from the standpoint of human flourishing, it is one of the deepest sources of liberal pathology.” And as Deneen himself notes, when people are dissatisfied with a vain quest to discover their authentic individuality and realize that they are starved of community, they often turn to totalitarian movements and leaders. Thus a vicious cycle arises in which the state expands ever more to control an ever more displaced, alienated, and manic constituency.
Communitarianism and Communalism: Differing Concepts of Culture and Virtue
Lacking face-to-face informal community, the real source of culture dries up, and liberalism replaces it with hollow facsimiles, which Deneen terms a “liberal anti-culture.”
Liberal anti-culture rests on three pillars. First, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity. Second, a new experience of time as a pastless present, in which the future is a foreign land. And third, an order which renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning.
These three cornerstones of human experience: nature, time, and place-form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names.
Any reader of this blog will recognize in this passage its similarity to Murray Bookchin’s diagnosis of the crises generated by liberal society in his Forms of Freedom lecture, or in The Ecology of Freedom. Reflecting their urban vs. suburban upbringings, Bookchin’s lament of the end of a culture which is developed and sustained “on the streets” is almost indisinguishable from Deneen’s lament of a culture developed and sustained “on the front porch.”
Returning to the basic analysis of human nature in Enlightenment thought, man’s true nature is obscured and distorted by culture-to be free is to be culture-less. Thus nature and culture are cleaved from one another as distinct and mutually repellant entities. Like Deneen, therefore, Bookchin advocated the creation of a new counterculture in opposition to liberalism’s anti-culture, one which recognized itself as a developmental extension of nature itself, fully embedded and responsive to nature’s demands and limits, and engaging in a rational, creative interpretation of natural phenomena as a source of ethical norms.
Both Deneen and Bookchin here explicitly credit their philosophical standpoint to Aristotle, who particularly in Nicomachean Ethics and Politics tries to anchor personal and communal behavior in what he believes to be “natural.” The political community itself only exists out of natural human instincts, our desire “not merely to live, but to live well.”
But it is here where Bookchin and Deneen fundamentally part ways. Whereas Deneen embraces the outcome of Aristotelian thought, Bookchin embraces its form (here in The Ecology of Freedom):
What we so glibly call “Greek science” was largely a nature philosophy that imparted to speculative reason the capacity to comprehend the natural world. To understand and impart coherence to nature was an activity of the contemplative mind, not merely of experimental technique. Viewed from the standpoint of this rational framework, Plato and Aristotle’s considerable corpus of writings on nature were not “wrong” in their accounts of the natural world. Within this large body of nature philosophy, we find insights and a breadth of grasp and scope that the physical and life sciences are now trying to recover. Their varying emphases on substance, form, and development-what are normally depicted as a “qualitative” orientation-exhibit a range of thought that may well be regarded as broader, or at least more organic, than science’s traditional emphases on matter and motion. The classical tradition stressed activity, organization, and process; the Enlightenment tradition stressed matter’s passivity, random features, and mechanical movement.
When we compare this to Deneen’s passage on the relation of nature to culture in Greek philosophy, the differences in their approaches starts to become more clear:
The revolutionary nature of the break introduced by liberalism is discernable even in the very word “culture.” “Culture” is a word with deep connections to natural forms and processes, most obviously in words such as “agriculture” or “cultivate.” Just as the potential for a plant or animal isn’t possible without cultivation, so it was readily understood that the human creature’s best potential simply could not be realized without good culture. This was so evident to ancient thinkers that the first several chapters of Plato’s Republic are devoted not to a discussion of political forms, but to the kinds of stories that are appropriate for children. In a suggestive statement winding up his introductory chapter in the Politics, Aristotle declares that the first lawmaker is especially praiseworthy for inaugurating governance over food and sex-that is, the two elemental human desires that are most in need of cultivation and civilization.
Where Deneen is leading is the idea that culture includes the domain of law (drawing from the Aristotelian idea that law is needed to guide people towards the good life)-while this idea is less explicitly stressed in Why Liberalism Failed, it has become far more pronounced in his rhetoric since, as in his address at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, in which he says the following of state and local governance:
Until fairly recently, such local governing institutions were charged, explicitly, with legislating morality-which is a far more constitutive part of the American tradition than one would recognize if one were only taught the invented tradition by the liberal ruling class. The states were charged especially to foster virtue in three different spheres. First, to promote the formation of families, the marriage of men and women, and the encouragement to have and protect children, that would issue from such marriages. There were laws against adultery and fornication, which were intended to discourage straying from the bonds of sacred matrimony, and to prevent the creation of children outside of wedlock. Laws presumptively against divorce were universal, making it rare and socially shameful. Localities, and later states, supported the creation of public school that was intended to reinforce, rather than undermine, the kinds of values that were enshrined in these laws and taught in homes.
The family was the basic unit of society, and the public order expressed its commitment to fostering familial stability, and the formation of the next generation. Second, local police powers of states and localities were intended to ensure a decent civic and public order. Laws against obscenity, pornography, were common until recent times. Some of a certain age can perhaps still remember that there existed national laws and regulations that mandated family programs during certain times of the day…Some of you, old enough, will also remember, it was Tipper Gore-yes, the wife of Al Gore-who encouraged and pushed for warning labels on albums.
Here we see much more clearly what Deneen seeks: municipal governments of some form or another, which enforce strict laws against what they view as immoral behavior upon their citizens. Moral actions do not need to be “made freely”-to Deneen, to be cajoled into a virtuous life by the police power of the state, provided that state is small and relatively democratic (a word which, along with his critique of the founding fathers, is noticeably almost absent from Deneen’s more recent speeches and writings), is itself to be made free from desire and vice. We can imagine how Deneen’s ideal “free” decentralized communitarian state would approach things like gay marriage, gender dysphoria, religious liberty (later on in the above address he goes on to praise the legal requirement for all citizens to believe in God) and, for that matter, freedom of speech.
In essence, Deneen seeks a renewal of sincerity-for everyone to be given a specified social role, and conditioned so that they would never think to seek to supercede it, recognizing it both to be morally wrong and punishable. To him, community and liberty, in not just the liberal but even moreso the libertarian sense of the word, are incompatible. We should scrap the past 300 years or so and take our experiment with pluralism, individualism and libertarianism as a mistake to be used as a warning to future generations.
Contrast this with Bookchin, who although eschewing liberalism, views it as a part of a dialectical, historical development towards ever greater degrees of freedom, diversity, and rich cultural complexity. Here, while the failures of liberal freedom are recognized and scrutinized, liberal freedom and the autonomous individual are not to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Not only would going back be impossible; it would be unnatural.
Liberty, Worthy of the Name
While Deneen speaks of a return to localized democracy and the deeply-ingrained civic spirit Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the American people in the 1830s, he is, at the end of the day, nonetheless a Burkean conservative. His faith in democracy is not based on the idea that individuals should engage in an intellectual dialectic with one another, creatively developing new political forms and ethically interpreting what is good for the community through the application of reason. Rather, it is based on the faith that common people do not really think for themselves, and shouldn’t be encouraged to. When given power over their collective destinies, they will fall back on old Christian (and, Deneen would presumably hope, specifically Catholic) dogma and arrive at a collection of decentralized communities which all live more or less the same way, with a 1950s (or 1350s?) set of values, cultural norms, and, most importantly, laws governing every aspect of their moral lives to be in accord with the Bible.
To any libertarian, left or right, this is self-evidently repulsive, not to mention boring. To return to an era where things like homosexuality were simply brushed under the rug, abortions were conducted in back alleys, women were constrained to the role of homemakers and baby production units, unhappy couples stayed together for fear of social suicide, and books and music all passed through the censors to ensure they didn’t poison the moral fiber of the community, is to simply try to unlearn all the liberal era has taught us in its willingness to explore human life with greater openness to difference and individuality. There is a reason sincerity eventually gave way to authenticity-not least of which that the life of virtue and study that Aristotle praised as the best sort of life was only possible through the degradation and exploitation of an underclass made up of slaves, women, and “vulgar craftsmen”-the working class.
In truth, the sincerity model collapsed precisely because it wasn’t natural. It foisted things upon people which they couldn’t ultimately accept-it allowed some people to flourish, yes, but most to languish, satiated only by their belief in a noble lie which they gradually came to revolt against. One major weakness of Deneen’s model is that it frankly doesn’t offer any rational argument against slavery, for instance, and would be forced to fall back on Catholic doctrine, which didn’t officially condemn slavery until 1839.
However one slices it, there is no universe in which Christianity alone would have led to the abolition of slavery. It was liberalism’s central conceit, held at bay for a time by an ideology of racial hierachy, that human beings were naturally free and came into community with one another to preserve that freedom, which gradually forced the institution of slavery to be dismantled. Slaves were human beings, and all human beings have equal right to agency (“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and the ability to partake in and enact their own individual reason, enhanced through education and material provision. We are not merely our social roles, preserving the community-we are ends in ourselves. Whatever flaws liberalism may have-and Deneen’s critique is largely correct-we do owe these beliefs to it.
Bookchin’s framework of natural ethics and politics is preferable because it recognizes that nature is dynamic-it develops and changes towards some end, as do people, and as should their societies, always striving, changing, and reconfiguring to create various, increasingly sophisticated and subjective outcomes. Bookchin contextualizes his model of decentralized communes in terms of our need to “reenter natural evolution”-to grow with and as part of nature as a whole, not to remain in a state fixed by theology, with law governed only nominally by democracy, in reality by ancient dogma. It is libertarian due to its interpretation of nature as a process of increasing subjectivity-a process by which nonliving matter become conscious beings which, over time, become increasingly aware and intelligent-in a word, free. That this freedom is enhanced by a commitment to virtue does not supplant freedom in the libertarian sense. Virtue cannot be conclusively derived from ancient books, however useful they may be-it has to be derived from an observation of the directionality of natural development, and, as I believe is coherent with that principle, a cultivated, guiding sensation of universal love.
Such interpretation has to be modest and aware of its own precarity-we are certain to constantly misstep and make mistakes, and natural evolution demonstrates that the only appropriate response to this is to recognize our mistakes and revise them as we go. Liberalism itself is guilty of this failure to recognize its greatest mistakes-its disrespect for natural limit, its disregard for community and organic culture-and we are in the process of making just such a revision. To strictly legislate morality in light of our own ignorance is, I believe, utterly hubristic. We cannot help but legislate along a certain moral code, but it must be done lightly and modestly, and only with the full capacity of those who object to leave and take root elsewhere-one of the central human freedoms proposed by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything.
Deneen, I believe, is correct that liberalism will fail due to its intransigence, and he is correct that the best path out of its failure will be the reconstitution of communities. What those communities will look like, however, remains highly unsettled, and the left’s underdeveloped and neglected communalist tradition desperately needs to offer robust alternatives to those offered by the communitarian right.