A Review of “Why Liberalism Failed”

One of the readers of my blog referred me to Patrick J. Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed.  He told me that it would be a difficult read, but that I needed to read it.  He was right.  It is a difficult read, and the other readers of this blog will benefit from reading it as well.

But first things first:  this is not a book about liberals vs. conservatives, the left vs. the right, Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump.  We hear and read more than enough about political polarization.   

Why Liberalism Failed is a much deeper dive than readers will get from newspapers, Social Media, or the Web.  Deneen is a political philosopher who is analyzing and critiquing the last remaining political philosophy of the twentieth century—liberalism—in contrast to fascism and communism which have, for the most part, collapsed. 

Another way to think of it is that he is re-examining the work of Aristotle, John Locke, Thomas Paine, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to see if, 500 years after Liberalism’s inception, and nearly 250 years after America’s independence, there is a sustainable future for liberalism; that is, for our way of life.  As I said in my introduction, it’s a book with a difficult topic, but we will benefit from reading it.

Deneen introduces his thesis in the preface:

This book was completed three weeks before the 2016 presidential election.  Its main arguments matured over the past decade, before Brexit or President Trump was even conceivable.  My basic assumption was that the underpinnings of our inherited civilized order—norms learned in families, in communities, through religion and a supporting culture—would inevitably erode under the influence of the liberal social and political state.  But I anticipated that liberalism would relentlessly continue replacing traditional cultural norms and practices with statist Band-Aids, even as a growing crisis of legitimacy would force its proponents to impose liberal ideology upon an increasingly recalcitrant populace.  Liberalism would thus simultaneously “prevail” and fail by becoming more nakedly itself (xiii).

He continues:

Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance.  The breakdown of family, community, and religious norms and institutions, especially among those benefiting least from liberalism’s advance, has not led to liberalism’s discontents to seek a restoration of those norms… .  Meanwhile huge energies are spent in mass protest rather than in self-legislation and deliberation, reflecting less a renewal of democratic governance than political fury and despair (xiv).

And he concludes:

…[T]he better course (read: solution) lies not in any political but in the patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order.  As the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel wrote in “The Power of the Powerless”; ‘A better system will not automatically ensure a better life.  In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.’  Only a politics grounded in the experience of a polis—lives shared with a sense of common purpose, with obligations and gratitude arising from sorrows, hopes, and joys lived in generational time, and with the cultivation of capacities of trust and faith—can begin to take the place of our era’s distrust, estrangement, hostility, and hatreds (xv—italics added).

In a voice similar to that of James Davison Hunter’s practice of faithful presence in To Change the World, where relationships and institutions are cultivated that are fundamentally covenantal in character and foster meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, belonging and fairness not just for Christians but for everyone (263) or, more recently, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy where, in his own breathtakingly honest memoire he concedes that public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us (255), Deneen encourages citizens to develop “…countercultural communities in ways distinct from the deracinated and depersonalized form of life that liberalism seems above all to foster (197)”. 

And what are these countercultural communities? 

These communities of practice are rooted and fostered in local settings, and are focused on the creation of new and viable cultures of household and civic polis life.  They are places like the Dream Center in Dubuque, Iowa, where Robert Kimball and his team are executing a vision to mobilize youth and families by embracing, empowering, and unifying through academics, after school programming, career assessments, goal setting, discipline, accountability, and other accomplishments, or The Pittsburgh Project  where our seminary alum and Project founder, Saleem Ghubril, envisioned a program over 30 years ago of after school and summer opportunities to serve 250 youth, and where 1,500 people annually are deployed to perform free home repairs for Pittsburgh’s elderly and poor citizens. 

These organizations, and others like them, help to facilitate the creation of communities and, thus, engaged participants of a localized new culture that revolves around rituals such as food, birth, coming of age, marriage, death, and virtues like honesty, gratitude, dependability, compassion and love.  These new cultures, over time, produce new generations of engaged participants in a way that liberalism never can. 

The “deracination and depersonalization” fostered by the political theory of liberalism is replaced by the persistent practices of intentional and accountable communities.  Deneen notes that these communities of practice will “…increasingly be seen as lighthouses and field hospitals to those who might once have regarded them as peculiar and suspect (197).”

There are many other examples of these counter cultural, formational entities in all of our local communities.  Look for them.  Serve in them.  Faith-based Universities like Clarke University, Loras College and the University of Dubuque seek to inculcate practices of healthy community in students even as they deliver coursework in theology, chemistry, business and mathematics. 

Places like the YMCA/YWCA, specialized daycare centers, and support groups like AA and Al-Anon are also communities of healthy ritual and virtue.  Healthy cultures are created by healthy rituals and virtues; healthy rituals and virtues help to form healthy people; and healthy people go on to form more healthy cultures through the creation of families and friendships, and by creating and volunteering in organizations that cultivate even more healthy cultures.

So even while many of my readers may be dismayed by the current tone of nastiness throughout much of our society, Deneen suggests that we remember Tocqueville who, when he visited America in the late 1820s, marveled at Americans’ do-it-yourself spirit.  Unlike his fellow French citizens who passively acquiesced to an aristocratic order, he observed Americans gathered in local settings to solve problems.  In the process, they learned “the arts of association.”  They were indifferent to the distant central government, which then exercised relatively few powers.   

But local township government or, in our case, school boards and city councils, were the “schoolhouse[s] of democracy,” because it was there that citizens gathered to debate and discuss their common life, not only for the ends they achieved, but for the habits and practices they fostered and the beneficial changes they brought to people.  Citizens who learned and contributed to this schoolhouse were changed through their associations and relationships with other—often times—more diverse, people.

The moral of this story?  Just turn off the television—or Social Media—or your Politico feed; they are not community.  In fact, our immersion in them gets in the way of community-building practices. 

Instead, spend some time and invest yourself and maybe even some of your treasure at the Dream Center, the Pittsburgh Project, University of Dubuque, Clarke University, Loras College or any one of a thousand counter cultural communities in your vicinity.  There you will experience both lighthouses and field hospitals of hope; the real and inspiring, but still quiet future that I believe lies before us.

 

Click here to read my previous post: An Approach To Servant Leadership