TOKENS PODCAST: S4E12
A vast majority of modern political discourse takes place along the party lines of the Right and the Left, two seemingly opposite forces locked in a stalemate on all manner of social and economic issues. But what if there’s a deeper philosophical issue at play? In this episode, University of Notre Dame’s Political Philosopher Patrick Deneen explains why this “division that seemed to define the modern world in fact is really two sides of the same coin…” That is, the philosophy of Liberalism: the taken-for-granted pursuit of a desire-fueled, constraint-free life, which he argues is so ironically successful that it is nearing its failure.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Patrick J. Deneen holds a B.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University. From 1995-1997 he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency. From 1997-2005 he was Assistant Professor of Government at Princeton University. From 2005-2012 he was Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, before joining the faculty of Notre Dame in Fall 2012. He is the author and editor of several books and numerous articles and reviews and has delivered invited lectures around the world.
Deneen was awarded the A.P.S.A.'s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995, and an honorable mention for the A.P.S.A.'s Best First Book Award in 2000. He has been awarded research fellowships from Princeton University, Earhart Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Virginia.
His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, liberalism, conservatism, and constitutionalism.
Published books include:
Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018)
Conserving America? Thoughts on Present Discontents (St. Augustine Press, 2016)
Democratic Faith (Princeton University Press, 2005)
The Odyssey of Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
Democracy's Literature (ed.), (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005)
The Democratic Soul (ed.), (University Press of Kentucky, 2011)
Redeeming Democracy in America (ed.), (University Press of Kansas, 2011)
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Our show is by no means a stranger to political critique of both the Right and the Left; we've had episodes on cancel culture, fake news, climate change, guns, faith and science, the death penalty, and such-like... we admittedly stir the waters, for, we trust, that good ends will come; yet we often reap a bit of backlash - also from both sides.
Underneath all that, there is for me, a deeper critique to be made: not just of particular issues held in particular ways by the right or the left, but of the political philosophy which actually gives rise to -both- right and left. What if...
Patrick: The political division that seemed to define the modern world in fact was really two sides of the same coin.
Lee: That's Patrick Deneen, Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame. This two-sided coin, he argues, is the political philosophy historically known as Liberalism.
Patrick: Liberalism is really a kind of philosophical tradition of the United States, it has its roots going well back hundreds of years before the American tradition itself.
By Liberalism, I don't mean the way that typically Americans use that word, which is to describe the left side of our political spectrum. I really mean the political philosophy of Liberalism, to describe or define a world in which liberty was understood as the absence of constraint upon my free exercise of my will or my desires.
Lee: Patrick is the author of the recent, much-talked-about book entitled Why Liberalism Failed, in which he brings to light the premises upon which the entire American left to right political spectrum is built. It's a system, he argues, that is bound to fail.
Patrick: Because it also doesn't comport with the realities of human nature. We're not creatures that flourish and achieve kind of the true form of happiness when we just do what we want. In fact, that's a very bad way to lead, to lead your life.
Lee: This is one of the most important interviews we've done so far. If you're new to this conversation about political liberalism, it is one of the most important keys to developing a non-ideological, non-partisan contribution to contemporary social life. And there abounds therein, all manner of ironies which we explore in the interview.
Patrick: Liberalism has failed precisely because liberalism has succeeded.
Lee: All this, coming right up.
INTERVIEW
Lee: Patrick J Deneen holds a PhD in Political Science from Rutgers University. He served as a speech writer and special advisor to the director of the United States Information Agency, has served on the faculty of both Princeton and Georgetown teaching Government, and is now Professor of Political Science at my Alma mater of Notre Dame.
His most recent and widely discussed book is entitled Why Liberalism Failed. Welcome Professor Deneen.
Patrick: Thank you. It's nice to be with you here from South Bend, Indiana.
Lee: Yeah, it was great to get to talk to you. We're recording this as we come into autumn. My five years in South Bend, I always loved September, October in South Bend, especially.
Patrick: It’s the best time of year here. And I really, anyone who, who has never been to a Notre Dame football weekend is missing out, I think.
Lee: I know, you know, I grew up in Alabama and going to Alabama football games as a kid. And I tell people, you know, I grew up, uh, really conservative Church of Christ kid in Alabama. And we, we always hated Notre Dame and we hated Notre Dame for two reasons. One, because they were Catholic and two, because Bear Bryant was always beaten by Notre Dame. And so it was always hard to stomach Notre Dame. And so then I ended up going to school there and, I think that Notre Dame football games certainly rival the pageantry of Alabama football games.
Patrick: I'm not going to get myself into the middle of that one, but it's, it is, it is worth the trip, but just to come from a really iconic, absolutely platonic ideal of the fall college football weekend.
Lee: Yeah. It is. It's lovely and beautiful. Well, thanks so much for your time to be with us. We appreciate it. Lots of conversation about your book, Why Liberalism Failed. Did you ever anticipate that this book would get as much conversation as it's gotten?
Patrick: No, I did not. In fact, I thought that this was written for a fairly small specific audience of more academic intellectuals and a small segment of the public intellectual. So it's been surprising and maybe the most surprising thing is the international interest in the book. That it’s been translated into about 20 languages.
That I did not anticipate. So something is happening globally that's of interest.
Lee: Well, I, I think, since a number of folks listening will not necessarily be typically employing the same parlance as you do, even with the word in your title, liberalism. Let's start without, for folks who are not familiar with kind of classical political liberalism. Could you just give a good definition of political liberalism?
Patrick: Sure. So by liberalism, I don't mean, in this case, the way that typically Americans use that word, which is to describe the left side of our sort of political spectrum, progressives or liberals as they're sometimes called. I really mean the political philosophy of liberalism, which is in some ways the kind of, in many ways, the, philosophical tradition of the United States. It has its roots going well back hundreds of years before the American tradition itself.
Uh, we could point to thinkers like John Locke or John Stuart Mill as its architects. And really the ideal was to describe or define a world in which Liberty was understood as the absence of constraint upon my free exercise, my will, or my desires. So really, it's a real transformation of a very old word Liberty, much older than liberalism, this old word Liberty, you find it in the Bible.
You find it in the classical authors: Plato, Aristotle. But by Liberty, they tended to mean a condition of self-government or self-rule, self-discipline. So it wasn't doing what you wanted to do.
So liberalism is really a kind of an alteration, you could say a kind of reversal of that classical or biblical definition, and shaped a kind of political social and economic order in its image.
So that today, if now, if you ask a student, even at Notre Dame, a Catholic school what's Liberty, they will use the liberal description of what Liberty is, even though they purportedly had been trained in a Catholic tradition. It is deeply seeped into our consciousness, mode of being, that Liberty is to be able to do what I want.
And of course it requires ironically and paradoxically, it requires a pretty extensive architecture to create this condition kind of political economic and social architecture. So that's, that’s really what I mean by liberalism in the book.
Lee: Yeah, Yeah, that's a very helpful overview. So then by the time you get to our day, we have, tell people that the right and left is an intramural debate about the meaning of liberalism, right? These are two facets of the same kind of sets of assumptions of Liberty, as you just described.
Patrick: I certainly, it's certainly a central argument that I make in the book. And when I say that I had originally intended the book for a fairly small number of people. It was the people who were interested in precisely this intramural debate. In other words, who saw it as an intramural debate, who suspected that the political division that seemed to define the modern world in fact was really two sides of the same coin. But I think what made the book really a central point of discussion is that that intramural debate was breaking down at the time the book was published. And I'm not so sure anymore, we can describe that that's what defines the left and the right. It certainly defines the left and the right in the post-World War II, Cold War, post-Cold War world. It was two iterations of liberalism. And I think now what's really exercising our politics is that, that agreed upon set of terms of the debate is actually breaking down and we're seeing a kind of reconfiguration of our politics.
Lee: I'd like to come back to that, but before we explore that more, the contemporary setting in which we find ourselves, talk to us a little bit more about the way you describe that kind of post-World War II right and left liberalism.
Patrick: Even up to the point when I wrote the book, it seemed to me, and I think to many people, that the way in which we described the political right and the political left in the United States as the kind of spanning the possibilities of political disagreement, in fact was actually a fairly constrained debate within the context of this Liberal order. And so in some ways I, really sought in the book to make the premises of that order, visible to us. In other words, when you're engaged in those debates, you tend not to see the terms, the deeper terms on which those debates are being engaged, which is precisely how to advance this condition of Liberty that I began by describing.
And as it turns out the right and the left were really arguing over means rather than ends. And the means that were really kind of being pushed or advanced was on the right, especially if you can think of the Ronald Reagan age, we can think of the philosophical figures who loomed large high-ec, Milton Friedman, these figures who were called conservatives, even Ayn Rand kind of popularized her, who really argued that it was economic Liberty that allowed us the full expression of our free choice, of free exercise, of our desires, our will, our powers.
Whereas it was the left that argued not necessarily against Liberty, but that Liberty needed in some sense a condition, a precondition of equality, equal opportunity to be free. And this therefore needed the intervention of the state to level the inequalities, especially produced by this economic order that was advanced on the part of the right.
And when you're in the midst of those debates, this seems like the, you know, the only choice in the world. Which side are you on? Are you on the side of small government, big government? Interventionists, economic policy, versus a laissez-faire economic policy? But from a, you take a step back, and what you really see is that these are both arguments in favor of this ideal of liberalism that both get advanced.
Regardless of the party, that's holding power, it gets advanced sort of in stutter steps, you know. On the one hand, the market gets more open. On the other hand, the state intervenes more in advancing what we now think of as sort of libertarian social policy, especially in regards to sexuality, and when we think today of identity politics and so forth. So while it seemed like we were in the midst of this deep internecine debate, what in fact was occurring was a deeper agreement that, what was really needed was the liberation of the human being from all unchosen bonds and obligations.
And so the basic argument of my book is that this project in fact was so successful that it has failed in the following sense. That once you liberate people from all of these unchosen, kinds of, forms of identity or, obstacles or responsibilities or duties, you create a society that's been both flattened and atomized. A kind of atomized society with the attendant breakdown in family, community, sociability, friendship, the kind of social side of our nature. So the core thesis of my book is that liberalism has failed precisely because liberalism has succeeded.
Lee: And then a corollary of that is that, what the right or the left bemoans in the opposite party is actually embedded in their own deepest commitments. You just, another kind of way to summarize what you just said, I think.
Patrick: Yeah, no, it's a much more potent and shorter version of that. But you know, really, a really good example of that today is, and we see, I think we see this, is how much, for example, the thing that's so important to the contemporary left, which is especially sort of individual autonomy when it comes, especially to those choices regarding family, sexuality, personal choices in the personal realm, have really gotten folded into sort of market forces.
Right? You have this kind of, this phenomenon of woke capital and what institutions are the biggest cheerleaders of this individual autonomy of choice? Well, it turns out they're the sort of the corporate entities, that, have really signed, you know, full on in terms of precisely, this, what was once regarded as, a realm that required a certain amount of, you know, kind of social norms.
And informal governance. You know, how to court, how to date. The norms of the relations between men and women have kind of a very fraught area that know used to have a lot of oversight of adults.
Parents that would sit within earshot of a couple, young couple, sitting on the front porch, you know, something I grew up with, and that has really ceased. That has gone away under the assumption that everyone should be allowed to do what they want to do. And notice how much that imperative of the left has folded into the imperative of the right, which has this kind of free operating individual chooser in the marketplace. And we've just, added to the marketplace, not only stores and, and stock markets, but also sort of dating markets and marriage. And this is just now one more market where you can go onto an app and swipe and find your next product that you want to purchase.
Lee: You have a foreboding line. I can't quote it, but it says something to the effect of what we increasingly see is the commodification of women and children.
Patrick: Yeah, that I actually wrote that in the new preface to the paperback edition. I was sort of trying to anticipate where this logic moves and was precisely this logic that I was just discussing the kind of folding into, into the, sort of the logic of the marketplace and the sovereign chooser. Those spheres of life that were once seen as somehow that's not appropriate, that version or understanding of choice and kind of the sovereign chooser isn't appropriate in certain spheres of life.
And one of them regarded that again, that complex, mysterious area of reproduction and what we're seeing now, increasingly, I think, this is only going to proceed, is the kind of commodification of children as desirable consumer products as it were. And for those who have the ability and the wealth to purchase a child on a kind of market, and to do so, especially through, as we move to our more, forms of reproduction that are to be governed by artificial, even mechanical means. The kind of commodification of women in the production of children. And so the topic of surrogacy is becoming more and more prevalent. And this is precisely where these kinds of market forces are meeting and joining. Again, this, imperative to be the sovereign free chooser. And again, it puts what has typically been the party that has been most mistrustful of the market here are the, the left, you know, traditionally the left has been the great critic of the dehumanizing force that the market can play on human life. And now it puts the left very much on the side of the market and market forces, because it wants to have the freedom and the ability to basically reproduce children at will, no longer to be subject to the forces of serendipity of nature and the limits of human biology. So this kind of joining of what had hitherto seemed to be the opposite sides is one of the ways that I think you see liberalism sort of becoming a single, you know, no longer a kind of divided within itself, but really as a solitary singular force.
Lee: In a setting in which people have assumed that the continuum of right and left, it sets the parameters for political debate. Since you're not saying what the right says, then people on the right, I would assume are often gonna look at you and say, well, you're just a leftist. And since you're not saying what the left is saying, the people on the left are going to say, well, you're just a, right-winger. But it's striking to me that you have endorsements, I think it's on the back cover, both from Barack Obama and Rod Dreher, because it's like, how can you get quite to more opposite polar endorsements than those two? How have you navigated that sort of, too easy temptation of others to categorize you and dismiss you?
Patrick: Yeah, I mean, my, you're correct about that. My readers, which ended up being a much more broader readership than I anticipated, have generally fallen into two camps. One of which likes half of the book, that tends to be critical of the right. And one which likes half of the book that tends to be critical of the left.
It's just, they only like the other half of the book. So yeah, Barack Obama had nice things to say about the book and I appreciate that, mister former president. But, he also made a point of saying that, he disagreed with fair amount as well, and that's not atypical. I would say the following that I think it was in many ways, the kind of, the ascendancy of liberalism as I've been describing it.
You know, in many ways it's a distinct historical, like any political order, any political movement, it had a very distinct, I think, high watermark in recent history. And that high water mark was as a result, or a consequence especially, of the United States, Europe, Western Europe, and especially the United States, fighting against the two great totalitarianisms of the 20th century.
So initially fascism and then communism, and in some ways, in order to define itself, especially against communism during the Cold War, you could say America's leading figures, it's intellectuals, the media figures, the, you know, we think of Walter Cronkite, you can think of, you know, all of the, significant figures of mid-century America. Until, you know, roughly around the time when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there was a kind of deep and profound agreement that this was America's philosophy. And the kind of culminated in Francis Fukuyama's essay and then book The End of History, in which he claimed that there was no more, nothing left to debate, that history had ended because America had won the Cold War in 89. And it solved the age old question of what's the best political order or political regime and the best political regime now had been definitively answered that it was liberalism.
But you know, at that very moment, you could say that was the high water mark from which then liberalism began to recede because it was largely a worldview that was defined against its enemy against its antagonist. But in fact, as a philosophy, I would suggest it didn't comport with the realities of human nature.
Of course, this is what led to the Soviet Union falling. The Soviet Union fell ultimately, you could make an argument about these economics were bad and had overspent weapons and so forth, but ultimately it fell because it was based on a false idea of human nature. And the false idea of human nature was that human beings in some way, shape or form didn't care more about their own things then everyone else's, or that we could, in some ways overcome the idea that, we had a preference for our own things, whether it was our children, our families, our places, our property, our traditions,
This was the dream of Marks. This was the dream of communism. And it just doesn't comport with human nature.
But for the same reason, I would submit that liberalism also was bound to fail because it also doesn't comport with the realities of human nature. We're not creatures that flourish and achieve kind of the true form of happiness when we just do what we want. In fact, that's a very bad way to lead, to lead your life.
Lee: That very basic definition of freedom seems so central. When I do my intro to moral philosophy stuff with undergrads, I’ll always talk about the example that Aristotle gives with the musician, right? And the, untutored musician becomes excellent in his or her craft by the long work of discipline and submission to rightful authority and learning these skills and habits and dispositions that allow a flourishing that could not ever be conceived when you simply do what you want. And it does seem to me that there seem to be a lot of folks, whether it be in personal development kind of field, or increasingly in recovery of virtue traditions, where people are beginning to see that, and voice that again. So you see some sort of signs of light of, rediscovering these old conceptions of freedom?
Patrick: Well in some senses, yes. I think you are right. Like, for example, in the field of economics, 20, 30 years ago, it was entirely dominated by the kind of Milton Friedman, high-ec assumptions of classical economics, which is that economics is the study of how to maximize your individual utility.
And that's, you know, it didn't matter whether you were sort of on the left or the right side of the study of economics. That was how you understood the discipline of economics. And I would argue this tended to be true in my discipline of political science, that political science transferred these liberal assumptions into the political sphere, which is that people in politics, there's a, book going back to 19, I think 1970s. I think it was Harold Lasswell wrote a book called Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, et cetera. In other words, politics was all about how you get the thing you want. It's all about the expression of self-interest. And I could speak, you know, in the economics realm, this of course has really changed a lot.
Daniel Kahneman at Princeton, for example, you know, has introduced models of irrationality and sociability into the study of economic choices and phenomenon. And, you know, there was a movement in the 1980s in political science that began talking about communitarianism. I was actually, when I came of sort of intellectual age, that was the element that I grew up in, intellectually. So I think that in some level there's a kind of, there’s an opening of a certain amount of debate that has reintroduced itself. On the other hand, we are the heirs of a lot of institutions and practices that I think still kind of holds sway from that high watermark of liberalism.
And I think exercise a lot of power in the American mythos in our self-conception of who we are. And I think when you look at, at all of the sort of studies the measurements of sociability of Americans today. This is one of the things that political science and sociology actually does pretty well at it.
Doesn't do a lot of things well. We can't predict elections, but we can actually, through a variety of kinds of studies, we can actually arrive at findings of how rich or how poor people's social lives are through a whole series of measures. You know, the most famous of these is probably Robert Putnam in his first essay and then his book Bowling Alone, in which he studied, not just whether people bowl, but to the extent that people bowl in bowling leagues and found that there was this rapid, extraordinary falloff from the sixties through the eighties and nineties. This, he then extended to a whole extensive sphere of, you know, how often do you have people over for dinner? How often do you play cards with people? How often does your family eat dinner together? How often, have you attended a, sort of a town hall meeting? Not just watched one on CNN, but actually attend a town hall meeting. And with extraordinary consistency Putnam and my colleague Christian Smith here at Notre Dame, who studies religiosity of young adults across a whole series of various measurements.
One of the things we can say is that the story of the second half of the 20th century in the United States has been the story of, social dissolution the dissolving of social ties and social bonds. So when I say that this kind of ethos has extraordinary staying power, I think it's now evidenced in just the array of empirical evidence that we see accumulated in how people live their lives.
Lee: You used the language several times of the great ironies of liberalism and you're pointing us to what I would think would be one of the greatest. That is the language of, that liberalism gives us the pursuit of life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet what's happened in the latter part of the 20th century, is that precisely in that sort of individualized pursuit, we've grown increasingly isolated and thus unhappy.
Patrick: Yeah, no, the phrase I think I saw that you're exploring this idea of pursuit of happiness. And the phrase pursuit of happiness is actually, it's interesting. It comes from John Locke. Not a lot of people know this. It comes not from document that inspired a lot of the Declaration of Independence, which is the second treatise of government.
It comes from his essay concerning human understanding, and it comes in particular in a passage in which he's talking about anxiety, the anxiety that accompanies any successful achievement. So when you do something that you might've thought you always wanted to do, your first response might be happiness.
Yes. I'm so glad that I achieved this. And then Locke says your second, your second impulse is the anxiety that what's next. What's the next thing I have to do. And you know, I always talk about this with my students at, I taught at Princeton, you mentioned Princeton, Georgetown and Notre Dame. This is like, you just mentioned this and they know exactly what you're talking about because you just, remind them of how they felt when they got into Notre Dame.
This like this, this you know, almost impossible task of getting into a University like Notre Dame. And their first reaction is just incredible joy. And then their second reaction is which clubs or which dorm, which hall, which internship, which graduate program, which professors, which recommendations am I going to need?
It's this immediate anxiety, right? And this is what Locke described as the pursuit of happiness. This is what he described as this is what the pursuit of happiness is. So in some ways it's kind of the constant, the receding horizon of satisfaction. And this is exactly what the ancient thinkers, when they talked about happiness, they were warning about.
Aristotle's warning is saying happiness isn't just the satisfaction of having gotten something, it's a life well lived in accordance with virtue. That is a specially a kind of conformity of our desires to that which is appropriate to those desires, that which we ought to attain. So that one can be happy in one's marriage, for example, because one has recognized that when it's attained something good. But by Locke’s telling, and this is appropriate given what we were just saying, by Locke’s telling when you get married, your first thought is, yeah, did I marry the right person? Is there something else out there? You know, maybe I got to check online, you know, it's kind of this anxiety of, did I settle?
Lee: What are other key ironies that you think highlight the dis-ease in liberalism?
Patrick: Well, I think, you know, given what we’ve just been talking about, here's maybe one of the deepest ironies. So the ruling class today, which I think is deeply infused with this sense of liberalism. You know, shaped and formed by it. If you go to a modern elite university, you're suffused in basic and education and learning how to achieve, learning how to live this life of the pursuit of happiness, really, it doesn't matter what you major in, that's really what you're studying.
Yet it's these people who hold this ethos of this liberated human self that actually are doing relatively well when it comes to things like getting married, having families that stay together, engaging in sort of social life, having this kind of voluntary association, soccer clubs, baseball leagues, and so forth.
It's the lower classes, the working classes, the lower middle class, depending on how we define these socioeconomic terms, who actually tend to express support for these kinds of values that the upper-class doesn't support. In other words, traditional family, traditional sort of you know, husband and wife, family, raising some kids, living in a community, contributing to that community.
This is something that the lower to middle-classes support in their worldview, but they're not succeeding in many ways and living it. We're seeing this kind of extraordinary divide where those who practice certain things don't preach it. And those who preach certain things, aren't able to practice it.
And I think really what we're beginning to see is that, these things that we might once have regarded as kind of, forgive the term, but kind of public utilities, the goods of family. The goods of neighborhood, the goods of associations, the goods of religion and belonging to a church. These are becoming luxury goods.
And in many ways, I think they're becoming luxury goods because we have shaped a world in accordance with these liberal assumptions and liberal practices in which those who actually have the education, the wherewithal, the means can in some ways purchase the security of those goods.
Lee: Hmm.
Patrick: And surround themselves with the kind of, you know, privately purchased as it were, securities of those goods.
Whereas those who aren't as well off both economically, educationally, socially, and so forth, don't have the old guard rails, the old sort of public forms of support for those goods, that once existed. And as a result, we have this, increasing, you know, we could say class benefit, that's arriving and arising from, the privatization of what you could regard as these sorts of public goods, the privatization and increasingly class sort of monopolization of these goods. It's something I think that, it contributes to one of the really most distinct divisions of our politics today. But if you were to spend any time at an elite university, which I've spent most of my adult living in, you would never hear a single person, mentioned it as a problem.
Lee: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
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This is our interview with Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame. Coming up, we'll hear about the ways in which liberalism operates as what he calls "anti-culture" - that is, the severing of all cultural and traditional bonds - as well as the ways one might develop meaningful, communal practices which counter the negative effects of liberalism.
Part two in just a moment.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Patrick Deneen.
Well, this relates as well to your phrase that classifying America as an anti-culture, right? That there's a sort of pervasive, acidic, effect of liberalism upon all sorts of traditional forms, communal forms, things that form us, or as the political fosters like to talk about, any sort of thick commitments, right?
It's always dissolving those sorts of things.
Patrick: Yeah, I have a chapter in the book called liberalism as anti-culture. And if we begin to reflect on the sort of the ideal of liberalism, what does it aim to? What is its Telus? What is its goal or aim? It’s goal or aim is the liberated human individual. Liberated not only from arbitrary political rule. When we think of liberalism, we tend to think maybe, okay, the Declaration of Independence. So we don't want to be ruled arbitrarily by the king, no taxation without representation. But it very quickly moves from a kind of say the rebellion against arbitrary political rule to the rebellion against arbitrary social and even private forms of rule.
I'm actually, I'm assigning and reading some John Stuart Mill today, his great book on Liberty. And Mill in that book speaks not of the problem of political despotism. He says Liberalism has solved the problem of political despotism. We have constitutions, we have ideas of rights, we have limited government, checks and balances, rule of law. The problem now is the governance, what he calls the despotism of custom.
It's the despotism of the views of a lot of other people that limits my ability to be the person, the distinct person that I want to be. He talks about the eccentric or the person of genius and that the purpose and aim of liberalism needs to become the protection of individuality.
Well, how does it become protective of individuality? It has to begin to break down this despotism of custom, what Mill sees as this now blanket of conformity now, not, in the form of laws, but just public opinion, sort of general expectations. What people do becomes the thing against which we must rebel.
So liberalism becomes literally a kind of anti-culture because you could say the culture is those kinds of broad sets of norms, practices, traditions that are handed down from one generation to the next, not as formalized law. Not as a codified document, but simply, you know, what we learned to do from our parents and our grandparents and our neighbors and our communities.
So liberalism really, in order for us to achieve this freedom, this Liberty, as the eccentric, the individuals, which becomes its aim. It must evaporate. It must eviscerate. It must weaken, dissipate, all of these kinds of cultural forms. And ironically, since we're speaking a lot of ironies and paradoxes, one of the ways it does this is by championing something we are familiar with in the language of multiculturalism.
And so in the eighties and nineties, as a member of the academy, this was the word on everyone's tongue. It's the same way the word diversity is on everyone's tongue today, but it serves a very similar purpose, which is that it turns out this language of multiculturalism was an umbrella commitment. That by appreciating all cultures, it allowed us to liberate us from any particular culture. In other words, it was precisely by transcending any particular culture you might be born into and becoming a kind of connoisseur of all culture, someone who is tolerant and appreciative of all cultures, that actually became one of the greatest forces for weakening cultures, because it really didn't take any culture seriously, seriously enough to say there are limits. There are very definite definitions of what constitutes good and bad, right and wrong, in a particular culture. It rather began regarding culture as a sort of, you know, fashions and food, and, different kinds of holidays.
So in this sense, liberalism's core feature, and I think distinction maybe to every other political and social form, is to become this kind of anti-culture and precisely, to remove the kinds of formative practices that in some ways you could say democratized things like family, things like successful raising of children, the kinds of social forms that make those kinds of practices much easier, that'd become much more difficult for those who are living at the sort of economic, socioeconomic edges of our society.
Lee: So I'm imagining someone listening who's new to these kinds of conversations, who might want to push back and say, that it sounds as if you're assuming that all traditions or at least your traditions are healthy and don't need to be pushed back on. Whereas someone pushing back might say, but there's a lot about a great variety of traditions that needs to be pushed back upon, that needs to be challenged, that needs to be discarded. How would you respond to that?
Patrick: I think there's no tradition as a tradition that you could look to and say that has been static and unchanging for its entire existence.
I'm a Roman Catholic. And I think it's fair to say that while official Catholic view is that Catholicism has been the same ever since the time that Jesus walked the earth, uh, the church of course, has gone through a lot of internal debates and changes and, responses to modern phenomenon.
So even where it can claim it's the same, it always needs in some ways to develop, in the context of its tradition. The great 19th century Catholic apologist convert, and recent Saint, John Henry Newman. He made the argument in a book that he wrote, called, The Development of Christian Doctrine.
The title's not quite right, I'm forgetting the exact title, but he argued that in order to stay the same, you have to change, when he was speaking about Catholic doctrine.
So I think there's a way in which the argument of someone like you just we're summoning, which is a very typical argument, tends to assume or hold the view that tradition is this somehow this unchanging and un-self reflective phenomenon. And I think this is simply a false dichotomy. And unfortunately many conservatives tend to take the opposite side of that which is to say, no, our tradition must always stay the same, must never change. And both of these are sort of, kind of, a false choice and it presents, you know, sort of, I think kind of unattractive false choices as these things tend to be.
I would say that a kind of healthy way of challenging a tradition tends to be from within the definitions and understanding of that tradition itself, because it, it begins with let's say with a kind of, I think a necessary kind of sense of gratitude toward what we've been given. That, every generation should have some sense and developed sense that we are the heirs of a kind of inheritance that we didn't build, and that we are beneficiaries of, through a kind of gratuitousness, through a kind of grace, and hence that we should feel that kind of gratitude. So I'll invoke a kind of Notre Dame moment for you, which is I live right off campus just to the south of campus.
I actually live, I don't know if you know the name, Moose Krause. He was the great athletic director. I live at Moose Krause's old house, which I feel very, very blessed to be in his house. So, this is the wall behind me. Moose might've been sitting in front of this wall. But, in order to get onto campus, you have to walk past Cedar Grove Cemetery.
Uh, you may have done that walk a few times, or if you walk out to the west of the campus, you have to walk past the cemetery of the holy cross. In other words, most approaches within the university, you have to walk past a cemetery, a graveyard. And I think that's very much by design, which is that as you're walking, as you're entering the campus, you’re reminded that this place and all that it represents, and all that it is, was built by in some cases, brick by brick, stone by stone, but also class by class, alumni class by alumni class, was built by these people. And you should feel some sense of gratitude toward those people. But if you begin rather presumptively with a view at tradition is bad.
The past is bad. The past that the repository of oppression, then you simply say, well, you know, all these people were bad. All of the past was bad. We needed to overturn this and you become a kind of anti-traditionalist and iconic class. But this now fills us with, you know, it doesn't develop in us a sense of gratitude, which isn't just unquestioning.
It's not unreflective. But it gives a presumption that we've been blessed with something.
I think it contributes to the sense of short-sightedness that defines our culture and our civilization. So that when you appreciate an inheritance, you also, I think develop a sense that we have to leave something for the next generation.
We have to put our brick into the wall. We have to contribute. And then hopefully when they walk past my grave, my wife and I have a plot in that cemetery. Hopefully some person in the future will regard where we rest, with a sense of gratitude. When that sense of gratitude is not developed you sort of feel like, you know, all I can do now is live in the present. And a society that literally saddles its children with debt, without an inheritance, without a memory of the past, in some ways it seems to me as a civilization bound for self-destruction. I think it's the defining mark of our civilization. And I fear to say that this is one of the ways that liberalism has failed because it has succeeded.
Lee: One quick commentary before I move to the next related point, talking about your Catholic heritage and, mine having learned to taste, with appreciation Catholicism and my time at Notre Dame. I am, I'm often haunted by the phrase from Flannery O'Connor who critiqued Protestantism as a do it yourself, religion. And I I think most Protestants know there's something quite true about Flannery O'Connor's critique of Protestantism. And, it's a haunting reality of the ease with which we can discard traditions and, act as if we can just simply reinvent things anew this week or next month yet again.
So, I resonate and appreciate the picture that you're drawing there. Let's move then to the question of where we find ourselves today. I think it's fair to say. I think it’s fair to say that your book is not particularly hopeful in the sense of it's mostly diagnostic rather than prescriptive, but diagnose a bit more for us before we do turn to the last question about some prescriptions that you give near the end of the book. Do a bit more diagnosis for us on where you feel like we are today in the last five years.
Patrick: You mentioned, Protestantism, Catholicism. I think, you know, in some ways we're entering a moment where, the end, the telos of liberalism, is really revealing itself in a kind of a full and very discernible way to the point where it is becoming the antithesis of what it claims to be.
So liberalism claims to be philosophically, those who were the architects of liberalism, claims to be a political order that is entirely neutral as to the choices that we make, the decisions we make, wants to leave us free for us to pursue our own idea of vision of the good, our own ideal of what human life should be.
And it's really just the purpose and role of the liberal order, the liberal state, just to provide the kind of, playing field for that. You know, it acts as a referee. If, you break the rules when you're pursuing your idea of the good, you can be put into time out into the penalty box, you can be arrested, you can be penalized. That's the image that's certainly, you know, sort of the typical way that any professor in political science would teach what liberalism is. But in fact, of course it has this kind of telos of the vision of the liberated human being.
In order to realize this anti-cultural self, the self without tradition, the self, without a sense of past and without a strong sense of what the future holds.
This dis-encumbered self, free of the burdens of a defining tradition, family, religion, society, and so forth. This globalized cosmopolitan deracinated self. There come points where there's going to be a good deal of resistance to that. And you're going to get the most resistance in the two areas that always gave liberalism the most problem from the very beginning.
And those two areas are family, because you don't get to consent to the family you're born into generally, right? You don't get ask your kid, do you agree to be born to us? It's just, it's just, it's just a matter of, you know, nature that, that an accident and, you know, it's kind of one of these unchosen facts of life.
You don't get to choose your parents and you don't get to choose your kids, generally.
And the other area is religion. You want to talk about a sort of, that which is given, the belief that we are created and we are created into a world that we don't make. That we are governed by laws that we didn't legislate, that these laws have a purpose and an end that we don't pick.
And this is everything from Aristotle to Aquinas to John Paul II. It’s all about the given-ness of the created order that we don't choose. We can either submit to it or we can rebel against it. You can be Satan, you can be Lucifer, uh, or you can be submissive, like the Virgin Mary. You can say, Fiat. I do. I accept.
So these are the two areas that are going to always be the greatest, obstacles to the realization of liberalism. And when you think about what are the two areas that are in some ways, the most internecine and volatile political battles of our day, these are the two areas.
And it's also where the liberal order is sort of revealing the hand, the armored hand, beneath its silk glove. Uh, in other words, that it will force us to be free if necessary. So, obviously in areas of religion, we saw under the Obama administration the emphasis upon the need for the state to enforce the ideal of, control over our bodies through contraception, our control over our reproductive systems.
And if you were an order of nuns, you would be forced to provide for it, to anyone employed by your order, even if that's something you disagree with. We see today in family law, a growing movement to say parents don't get to tell their children who they are, what they are. In the area of transgender, increasing fights and battles over whether or not homeschooling should be permitted.
Watch this one because there's movements at Harvard Law School to move toward the German model, which forbids homeschooling. And if it's at Harvard Law School, you can expect it's likely to break out into our politics before long. So I think these two areas where you could say liberalism has always found the hardest nut to crack.
This is where liberalism is showing itself to be completely willing, to be a kind of, much more authoritative and even authoritarian order, as regards to those areas. And it's in these areas that I think, again, kind of ironically, there's a kind of willingness to regard a certain amount of hierarchy, a certain amount of given-ness and a certain amount of governance as natural, where liberalism is likely, the liberal order is likely, to be most authoritarian.
Lee: Given these diagnoses I think you say in the preface to the paperback or second edition, that while you had prescribed certain short-term practices, now you're seeing much more quickly the need for, I think you called it epic theorizing. So kind of give us a glimpse of both of those.
One, what do you, what do you see as helpful immediate practices if somebody is hearing you and they say this makes all sorts of sense to me. So what in the world am I supposed to do with this? What sorts of short term practices do you suggest?
Patrick: Well in the book I conclude maybe by echoing, you mentioned Rod Dreher who liked the book. And I think he liked the book in particular because I, positively invoked his, then best-selling book, The Benedict Option as a kind of example of an ideal of culture building. So if we live in an anti-culture, the way to be counter-cultural is to be cultural if I can put it that way.
In other words, to build to the greatest extent that one can kind of cultural forms and cultural practices where one is. And of course, I find that relatively easy to prescribe living as I do right off campus of Notre Dame in south bend, because we're surrounded by a lot of really strong Catholic families where it's, you know, without a lot of difficulty, it's pretty easy to find people who are interested in raising their children and having family life and having a kind of integration of religious life, neighborly life, university life work life, this is relatively easy. It's much harder in an anti-cultural space like the United States for many people to build that.
But I do think when one lives in a kind of anti-culture it's not unsurprising that you would find other people who are seeking to build that. Now the irony here again is that this would have once been, you could say the default, living in a culture is kind of the human default. In most times in most places. Now, you kind of have to build it by choice and by kind of conscious decision and, through a kind of mutual building. So, the irony is that in a liberal society, you can build a kind of non-liberal way of life because of the very conditions of liberalism. It makes it possible to be a cultural person through a kind of choice through exactly the kind of choice of the free individual. But it's a kind of shared willingness to put oneself into a condition of cultural forms and cultural practices that seek to limit or give form to the human life that doesn't share the same views of freedom that liberalism does.
So I think that's, that's an option that's available to people to a greater or lesser extent at any given time that doesn't require a wholesale political transformation. That's what I meant by being able to do this here and now, without assuming that we're going to have a completely new political order in the next week or two.
Lee: Right. And then the broader picture. What do you anticipate happening in the next or needing to happen in the next decade, two decades, three decades?
Patrick: Well, I, think, you know, at the time that I wrote the book, as I've said at the beginning, it seemed to me that the settlement, this, intramural debate, we were talking about, the definition of the left and right. It seemed so settled. It was almost unimagined that it would change. And even, you know, between the time that I finished the book it came out in book form, that had been completely upended.
We had Brexit, we had, the election of Donald Trump just, shortly before I finished the book. And, course the rise of what's called populism throughout Europe. And I think in its various ways, often in articulate often undertheorized. I think dismissed by most of the people who would be in an intellectual position and a kind of position of leisure, to analyze it.
I think, unappreciative of the ways that this is a kind of reaction against the deracinated and I think increasingly class divisions that exist within American society. So I think it's in the interest of the ruling class, which is the liberal class, to dismiss it by any means necessary.
And yet I think this has begun to be a kind of redefinition of our politics.
One of the interesting things that could arise is something of a coalition between a kind of old leftist and a certain kind of person on the right who are actually finding they have a lot more in common when it comes to their respective reactions to the liberal order. If your readers are familiar with the author, Christopher Lasch, who wrote in the 1990s. He was a man of the left who analyzed many of the phenomenon that we are seeing, coming to pass today and saw these as a man of the left as a kind of rise of a new liberal class that was really aimed at governing and even suppressing the basic impulses of the working class.
And he, as a man of the left, he was really a critic of liberalism. And so I think there is this remnant of the old left, and it's being combined in interesting ways with the new right in ways that I think will realign our politics. So I think right now we're seeing a kind of realignment of our politics. And one of the reasons why it's in such an upheaval is because we have no longer agreed on the terms of the debate. We don't, we don't agree that we're within the same company, the same as you put it, intramural conversation or intramural debate. I see this as a, on the one hand as a kind of hopeful sign, because I do think that liberalism has in some ways exhausted itself, and uh, kind of successor philosophy is needed.
But of course I do view it with a good deal of trepidation, because as a philosopher, I'd like to say, this is how it should look when this unfolds politically. But I also know that politics isn't easily controlled by the philosophers and it's doesn't tend to the terms of the debate that I would like to see.
So it's a fraught time and even a dangerous time. But I think in some ways, probably an unavoidable time, because I do think we're seeing the end of a certain period of ideology and something will succeed it. And it's up to us to define what that was.
Lee: In addition to processing all the things we've already discussed, I wish all of my colleagues in higher education could read your chapter on the failure of universities to make the case for the liberal arts and the humanities, which I think is a terribly helpful chapter as well.
But thank you for your work. We've been talking to Professor Patrick Deneen, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame on his recent book entitled Why Liberalism Failed. Thanks so much, Professor Deneen.
Patrick: Thanks so much for having me.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
If you would like to hear more surprising realities regarding America's political situation, then check out our recent episode with Dartmouth College historian Randall Balmer on race and the rise of the religious Right, or our episode with Philosopher Justin McBrayer on the rise of Fake News.
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