Rediscovering a Politics of Limits

5,816 words

Patrick J. Deneen
Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future
Sentinel, 2023

Patrick J. Deneen, a professor of Political Science at Notre Dame, came to prominence as the author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018), a book that contrasted our present circumstances with the rosy promises of previous generations of liberals. I published a favorable review here at Counter-Currents. Deneen’s latest offering, Regime Change (2023), continues many of the same themes, but shifts its emphasis to positive recommendations for the ordering a postliberal world, particularly a recovery of the ancient ideal of the mixed constitution as the best means of avoiding destructive conflict between the few “haves” and the many “have-nots.”

Such conflict was perhaps the chief feature of the internal politics of ancient Greek city states, and the stakes could be high: the class strife at Corcyra described by Thucydides ended only once the democratic faction had physically exterminated its oligarchic rivals. Because of such examples, the proper resolution of class conflict was a central concern for the earliest political thinkers of the Western tradition.

These men observed that both the wealthy leisure class and the common laboring class had characteristic vices and virtues. Ruling minorities were liable to use their wealth or position to take advantage of the majority, pursuing their narrow class interests under color of concern for the common good. On the other hand, they were better able than the masses to acquire education and taste. They valued the intrinsically noble or beautiful as well as the merely useful, and sometimes became discriminating patrons of the arts. In the best case, they developed a sense of noblesse oblige, a disposition to use their privileges for the benefit of the community as a whole rather than mere self-indulgence.

The lower classes were crude and suspicious of all that was unfamiliar. They were inclined to resent the more fortunate, whether justifiably or not, and were therefore susceptible to the blandishments of ambitious demagogues. On the other hand, a life of material necessity left them (in Deneen’s words)

grounded in the realities of a world of limits . . . the political embodiment of common sense, bearers of a deposit of practices and beliefs born of close experience with reality . . . that acted as a kind of bottom-up law and education, offering guidance to each successive generation on how best to make one’s way in a challenging world.

At their best, they tended to frugality, gratitude for small blessings, and a stoic cheerfulness in the face of adversity.

Ancient thinkers saw the problem of politics as how to harmonize the interests of these two classes, promoting their characteristic virtues and suppressing their vices. The solution they found was the “mixed constitution,” of which there exist different models. Polybius believed that the few and the many should balance one another, as he claimed occurred under the Roman Republican constitution. Aristotle emphasized the importance of a “middling element” which did not unambiguously belong either to the wealthy few or to the laboring many. Free of both envy and arrogance, this element was disposed to obey reason as embodied in laws that applied to everyone.

The liberal revolution of early modern times is commonly associated with opposition to feudal privileges, but this does not mean it championed the many over the few. Rather, it sought to replace an elite of inherited status by one consisting of those Locke called “the industrious and rational”—also very much a minority of the population. The original liberals stressed the importance of preventing the masses from interfering with the activities of their industrious and rational betters. They hoped the new ruling elite would enrich all classes sufficiently to reconcile the working masses to its rule. If this project succeeded, continuing economic progress would make a mixed constitution unnecessary.

Classical liberalism did succeed, and resulted in a new kind of society on a larger scale and with broader social interaction. A later generation of liberals came to believe that the private initiative of economically motivated individuals was no longer sufficient as a motor for continuing progress under the new conditions. They sought to supplement rising material prosperity with moral progress, the latter to be attained by overcoming parochial identities in favor of a national (and later international) spirit of solidarity.

These new “progressive” liberals favored rule by a talented elite, and feared the influence of the masses no less than their classical liberal predecessors. But they saw the danger presented by the common man not so much in his envy of the more successful as in his narrowness of views and the conventionality of his inherited ways. Most ordinary men are content to live as their fathers did, and are suspicious of transformations spearheaded by a clever elite. But progressives believed the descendants of the hayseeds of their own age would someday bless the liberal elite’s disregard of the foolish wishes of their benighted ancestors.

Deneen considers John Stuart Mill, living and writing long before the progressive era, the prophet of this way of thinking. Mill saw the inherited beliefs and practices of ordinary people not as a valuable distillation of practical wisdom but as “the despotism of Custom,” from which an enlightened minority must seek to free the world. This would allow for new “experiments in living” which would challenge customary ways and take progress to new heights. Mill proposed a system of plural voting in which those with more education would be afforded more votes than the conservative majority.

Rejecting the classical ideal of laws based upon objective standards of how one ought to live, Mill substituted the “harm principle” under which nothing would be forbidden by law which could not be proven to harm anyone. The harm principle was destined to a great future, as we shall see.

Rule by the progressive elite was meant to apply not only within Western countries but on a world scale. Mill believed that “the greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of custom is complete.” It was the duty of enlightened Westerners to bring progress to the rest of the world by compulsion, if necessary, since progress could not be properly valued except by those who had experienced it. This might even involve forced labor, since the early stages of progress required industrious habits that he thought could not be inculcated in any other way.

Progressive liberalism is the dominant strand of liberalism in the Western world today. So-called neoconservatives who advocate the military imposition of liberalism and progress on recalcitrant nations are very much the heirs of Mill’s way of thinking.

Marxism forms a third progressive tradition, though less influential in the West today than liberalism. Marx understood the conservative nature of the peasantry, but believed that once transformed into an urban industrial proletariat by capitalism, the laboring masses would be deculturated enough to serve as a revolutionary force. So in contrast to liberals, he believed the many could serve as the agent of progress by combatting the reactionary few (the capitalists). As the Communist Manifesto puts it: “The proletarian movement is the movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”

However, Deneen’s brief treatment of Marxism emphasizes the difficulties which Marxists—beginning with Marx himself—have had in maintaining their faith in the revolutionary nature of the broader working class. In 1870, Marx concluded that a revolutionary elite would have to “initiate measures” which might later be attributed to the workers. Lenin advocated a small party of professional revolutionaries acting as the workers’ “vanguard.” Western Marxism, as typified by the Frankfurt School, gave up on the working class entirely. So in practice, Marxism became nearly as elitist as classical and progressive liberalism.

None of these three modern varieties of political thinking perceived any need to balance the interests of society’s progressive element against those of the unenlightened, or the few against the many. All would have understood the classical ideal of the mixed constitution as of merely antiquarian interest.

***

With this historical and theoretical background, let us examine what Deneen has to say about today’s liberal elite, which he calls something “altogether new in the history of humanity.” First, it is defined by and distinguished from the rest of the population not by inherited rank, wealth, or the bearing of arms like previous elites, but by the mastery of fungible skills (usually attested by credentials). Second, it is fiercely opposed to the principles of hierarchy and inherited status, despite its own position at the top of the social hierarchy and desire to pass this on to its children—a contradiction that leads it to practice elaborate forms of self-deception. Third, it resists popular challenges to its power by weaponizing Mill’s “harm principle” against non-elite remnants of traditional belief and practice. Fourth, it exercises power not mainly through control of government, but of large capitalist enterprises as well as quasi-private communication organizations (the media and the entertainment industries) and “higher education” (elite recruitment and training).

The predominant progressive strand of liberalism is the ideology of this managerial elite first described by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. The modern corporation is distinguished from the classic bourgeois capitalist corporation by the separation of ownership from control—the entrusting of practical decision-making to trained specialists who need not have any proprietary interest in the companies they manage. The skills which define these specialists include (in Deneen’s words) “the manipulation of abstract data, financial manipulation, risk management, cost-benefit analyses, actuarial calculation, efficiency maximalization, and the like.”

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Like other historical elites, the managers and technicians have developed certain characteristic traits based on their common situation and interests. Notably, since their skills are easily transferable, they have virtually no loyalty to particular places or people. They are clever people with high IQs, but not broadly or deeply educated. They despise the past, feel no connection to their ancestors, and are actively hostile to inherited ways of life. They believe in the “meritocracy” which got them where they are, but without understanding that the cleverness needed to acquire specialized skills is not merit simpliciter. In other words, they are prone to infer from their achieved status that they are both wise and good, and that those who have not achieved elite status are their intellectual and moral inferiors whose failure is their own fault.

This is different from the class prejudices of the past: the landed aristocracy may have despised the peasants as malodorous boors, but they never blamed them for their inferior station, and sometimes even recognized duties toward them. The only justification for differences in ascribed status in a traditional society was that they were willed by God for his own inscrutable purposes. Today’s elites believe they have earned their status through their own hard work, failing to understand that intelligence is as much an unearned inheritance from one’s ancestors as landed estates used to be. (Deneen does not bring out this point, which would have strengthened his overall argument.)

The only remnant of intergenerational loyalty the managerial elite display is an often fierce determination to pass their status on to their offspring, which they manage through assortative mating, exclusive private schools, SAT prep courses and—in one scandalous case a few years ago involving Hollywood actresses—actually bribing prestigious universities. Such “meritocrats” have proven nearly as successful as the feudal lords of old in perpetuating their status in their children, as witness the high-flying career of prominent mediocrity Chelsea Clinton.

Deneen provides a delightfully apt description of elite recruitment:

A vast testing and assessment regime exists to identify managerial talent in every location around the globe, extract the human raw material from whatever arbitrary location it happened to be born and raised, refine that material in elite educational institutions, and insert it into the global economy in key urban hubs that become magnets for the refined product.

The process might be likened to a cultural strip-mining operation. The “education” to which this human raw material is subjected, apart from training in skills useful to the regime, has two main objects:

First, taking part in the disassembling of traditional guardrails through a self-serving redefinition of those remnants as systems of oppression; and second, learning the skills to navigate a world without any guardrails. College is a place and time in which one experiments in a safe atmosphere where the guardrails have been removed, but safety nets have been installed. One learns how to engage in “safe sex,” recreational alcohol and drug use, [and] transgressive identities.

Protest is not only permitted but encouraged—so long as it targets only traditional norms and not the interests of the current regime. (American students recently learned this distinction the hard way when they protested Israeli actions in Gaza, assuming it would be no different from denouncing “heteronormativity.”)

The process of elite recruitment is extremely selective, with the acceptance rate at Harvard University recently sinking below five percent. Yet the managerial elite has successfully combined its own rule with a radical egalitarian ideology involving massive self-deception. In contrast to the old social democratic left, it ignores gaping class inequalities in favor of an exclusive focus on residual inequalities relating to racial and sexual identity which can be blamed on the moral and intellectual backwardness of non-elites. Today’s elite does not care that the system over which it presides grinds down and alienates ordinary Americans. Instead, they denounce ordinary Americans for preferring to live around people like themselves, or Christians who persist in believing families more important than homosexual bathhouses. Such powerless people are said to be guilty of oppressing others whom the managerial elite sees itself as defending.

Deneen uses the controversy surrounding Indiana’s passage of a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 2015 to illustrate the resulting dynamic. The Act was modeled on existing federal law as well as similar legislation in twenty other states, but by 2015 “religious liberty had become a flash point in the culture wars, interpreted by advocates of gay marriage to be a way of protecting Christians from offering commercial services to gay marriage ceremonies.” Accordingly, a number of powerful corporations threatened to boycott Indiana over RFRA, including Apple, Eli Lilly, Salesforce, and Angie’s List.

A local reporter went looking for the sort of bigots who might seek protection from the new law and found a family incautious enough to speak with her: the owners of a strip-mall pizza parlor in a run-down rustbelt town. While making clear they would not deny service to anyone, one family member acknowledged that they were Christians and would prefer not to cater gay weddings. The remark was obviously hypothetical, since few people want their wedding catered by a pizzeria. But this made no difference: the “story” became national news and an internet lynch mob descended on the unfortunate family, describing them as “in-breds” and doing all they could to ruin their modest livelihood.

To anyone with common sense, this anecdote sounds like Goliath complacently squashing David like a bug, but to believers in the progressive liberalism championed by our managerial elite, the national corporations threatening Indiana over RFRA were bravely fighting for equality against the powerful forces of oppression embodied in the owners of that local pizza parlor. In short, the elite’s peculiar understanding of “equality” is a means of disciplining the subject population, and will never threaten its own status or interests.

John Stuart Mill’s harm principle has also been transformed into a weapon against the elite’s perceived enemies. Originally, the principle that the law may only intervene to prevent harm (rather than enforcing good practice) was intended to expand freedom to its greatest practicable limits. For a time, sociologists tried to study the broader effects of controversial behavior in an effort to apply Mill’s principle literally, but this is now out of fashion. Instead, the discovery of “harm” is increasingly entrusted to the purported victims themselves, especially those belonging to regime-favored identity groups. So-called transsexuals, e.g., can now claim psychologically harm from “deadnaming,” and call upon the intervention of institutional power to retaliate against those who decline to indulge their fantasies.

Such accusations of harm make a pretense of being defensive, but in fact they are wielded aggressively and even tyrannically against any failure to approve increasingly extravagant and destructive “experiments in living” such as sex changes for minors or drag queen story hours. Christians are a preferred target, since they are almost the last significant group to reject what Deneen calls “the individual liberationist ethos [of] self-fashioning.” In short, “Mill’s heirs have discovered that the invocation of ‘harm’ can be extended nearly without limit when invoked as subjective claims based in identity.”

Having few bonds themselves, members of the liberal elite are unable to understand the dependence of ordinary people on a thick web of local attachments which they are unwilling and sometimes unable to abandon. They advise the inhabitants of decaying post-industrial towns to rent U-Haul trucks and move to Silicon Valley. Fifth-generation farmers who lose their ancestral lands simply need to “learn to code.” Such obtuseness bears more than a passing resemblance to Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake,” but today’s elites have no idea what became of Marie Antoinette.

A major consequence of elite detachment from place is their political alignment with similarly uprooted foreign migrants who provide them with low-cost labor. Non-elite Americans are casually dismissed as “racists” for objecting to having their wages undercut or even being placed in physical danger by the new arrivals. For the worst of our elites, such harm is part of the point. This animus against the general population has resulted it “elite” becoming a pejorative term, something new in history. Ancient elites often simply called themselves the best men: hoi aristoi, optimates. But, as Deneen points out, there exists no positive word today for the people at the top of society.

***

During the liberal era, the ancient conflict of the few vs. the many was displaced by a shifting set of conflicts of principle conventionally described as pitting a reactionary “right” against a progressive “left.” Originally, liberalism itself constituted the left, but by the middle decades of the last century the triumph of liberalism was so complete that competing versions defined the entire spectrum of permissible opinion, with classical liberalism cast as the “right.” More recently, classical and progressive liberalism appear to have become reconciled under the banners of neo-liberal globalism and “woke” capital. At the same time, the many have increasingly made their displeasure with the liberal elite felt in a broad movement known as populism. The elite have responded with shrill denunciation of the threat to their rule (“democracy”) from the foolish and bigoted masses. The ancient conflict has returned with a vengeance.

The managerial elite stake their claim to legitimacy not on divine will, inherited status, or wealth, but on their possession of a certain kind of knowledge or skill, as contrasted with popular ignorance. Now, classical political thought has something to say about the place of expert knowledge in politics, just as it does about class conflict. Some of the Platonic dialogues (e.g., Meno) cast serious doubt on whether political rule is or can ever become a teachable art analogous to piloting ships. The Republic does contain an argument for rule by expert philosopher-kings, but it is presented as part of a utopian thought experiment. As Deneen notes, Socrates is even depicted as somewhat embarrassed by his own suggestion.

Such skepticism about the usefulness of expertise in politics, however, declined greatly in the modern era:

The watershed that marks the transition of modernity from the classical and Christian tradition was the loss of embarrassment over such claims, indeed, the certainty that progress could be achieved through the exertions of an enlightened class and the willingness to promote a cult of expertise.

This is already true of classical liberalism, but is especially obvious in progressive liberalism, which sought the professionalization of government through a meritocratic civil service practicing a “science of administration.” At first, such administrators were expected to ascertain objective facts and then design policy in order to carry out the democratic will (this was John Dewey’s vision). But over time the will of the supposed experts themselves became the central focus. And their will turned out to be constant, unending, where possible accelerating social transformation. In a stable society, after all, their skills would be in far less demand, and their rewards correspondingly smaller. Of course, their rule was supposed to benefit the masses eventually, but this could only happen if popular skepticism regarding the wisdom and benevolence of the experts was ignored or suppressed. After all, the experts were the best judges of their own wisdom and benevolence, as of everything else.

As Deneen points out, Covid-era injunctions to “trust the science” demonstrate that the appeal to the political authority of expert knowledge is alive and well. But there are at least two weighty objections to such appeals. First, even where the facts about an illness such as Covid are not in dispute, reasonable people may disagree on the best policy to implement in view of those facts. Second, “trust the science” in practice means “trust the scientists,” and while science itself may be more or less objective, the human beings acting in its name have motives that do not follow simply from the science itself.

Plato’s student Aristotle made one of the earliest cases for the value of nonexpert opinion, also known as common sense. He points out, e.g., that the man who uses something may be better at judging it than the expert craftsman who made it. Someone who lives in a house becomes more familiar with its good and bad points than the architect who designed it. Today’s populists might be likened to exasperated residents of a house designed and constantly redesigned by generations of expert administrators who have disregarded their feedback.

Common sense is also broader and more comprehensive than expert knowledge, which relies essentially on specialization. To make this point clear, let us pause a moment to consider the nature and effects of specialization.

The industrial revolution over which classical liberalism presided was largely (but not exclusively) an application of the principle of division of labor. In Adam Smith’s famous example, so simple a craft as pin manufacturing could be subdivided into “eighteen distinct operations,” exponentially increasing the number of pins that could be made in any given time and lowering the cost to the consumer in proportion. But, as Smith noted, this required that rational beings devote their full attention to the eighteenth part of a pin, something hardly natural to them. A century and a half later, Deneen reports, Henry Ford had to hire 963 men for every 100 who proved capable of enduring the monotonous work on his automobile assembly lines. Specialization has amounted virtually to a Darwinian selection event for our species, favoring those “capable of compartmentalizing their labor while shutting down the natural human desire to see a project through from start to finish and to see the connection of one’s work with that of one’s fellows.”

As Adam Smith also observed, specialization and the division of labor apply not only to manual work but to the natural sciences and even entirely theoretical disciplines such as mathematics or philosophy. Advances in these domains increasingly require a narrowing of purview in the professional expert. And as on an assembly line, the total increase in human knowledge achieved in this way comes at a cost: universities have become unbridgeable archipelagos of expert knowledge where even colleagues within the same department are unable to understand each other’s work.

Unfortunately, specialists themselves are often more in the dark than anyone else about the inherent limitations of narrowly specialized knowledge, and happily hold forth on all sorts of subjects. The abruptness with which many “experts” start babbling about “racism and sexism” the moment they step outside their area of expertise is revealing. They parrot the ambient ideological discourse as reliably as any teenage girl, and for the same reason: lack of other mental resources.

Socrates already remarked on the tendency of specialized craftsmen to mistake their limited knowledge for a more general wisdom. He concluded that he was better off ignorant but conscious of his ignorance than imagining an ability to make shoes qualified one to govern Athens.

It may sound unfair to compare our managerial elites to ancient cobblers with delusions of grandeur, but let us recall Deneen’s own list of the soft of skills currently in demand: “the manipulation of abstract data, financial manipulation, risk management, cost-benefit analyses, actuarial calculation, [and] efficiency maximalization.” The “merit” involved in possessing such skills is largely limited to helping manage and direct modern mass organizations. How might the truly great men of our civilization—Leonardo, Shakespeare, Mozart, Pascal, Newton, Goethe—have measured up to such a conception of “merit?” Would they necessarily have excelled all other men at just these sorts of skills? More importantly, would doing so have satisfied them fully, or allowed them to express what was most important in their natures? Are managerial and technical skills the highest functions to which a man can aspire?

Only if the managerial regime is the supreme and unsurpassable achievement of the ages, the sum of human aspiration. But in fact it was nothing more than an unplanned response to the revolution of mass and scale ushered in by the industrial revolution, a consequence of denser populations made possible by industrial production. It involved no increase in the higher forms of human achievement represented by the sort of men just listed. We merely became bigger, not necessarily better. It is every bit as absurd to equate skill at data analysis with human “merit” as it was to confuse mastery of shoemaking with the ability to rule a Greek city state.

Some readers may doubt whether apologists for the managerial regime really have so naïve an understanding of the meritocracy they advocate. It is true that they usually do not state their views as baldly as I have, but occasionally they come close. Deneen cites the following revealing remark by former Harvard President and Obama advisor Larry Summers: “One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is a kind of a disequalizer. One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.” In other words, our managerial meritocracy represents an unprecedentedly just form of society uniquely informed by “truth.”

By contrast, common sense as embodied in custom and the proverbial wisdom passed down through the generations is a distillation of the experiences of many men in many different circumstances. It wells up from the bottom of the social hierarchy, from the lives of ordinary people. Such people may even be more likely to have attained the Socratic wisdom of knowing when they do not know something, and of seeking out the authority of experts in those particular cases. The political regime informed by this popular ethos has a far better claim to the adjective “democratic” than managerial liberalism. It will tend to stability rather than striving after endless progress. As Polybius wrote, in a passage cited by Deneen:

That is no true democracy in which the whole crowd of citizens is free to do whatever they wish or purpose, but when, in a community where it is traditional and customary to reverence the gods, to honor our parents, to respect our elders, and to obey the laws, the will of the greater number prevails, this is to be called a democracy.

Aristotle observed that oligarchs tend to arrogance and impatience at being ruled, even by laws applying to all. He even thought the common people excessively humble, possibly because they internalize the humiliations inflicted upon them by the wealthy and powerful. He observes that his ideal “mixed constitution” involving a large middling element might be seen equally well as either a broad oligarchy or a moderate democracy (i.e., one excluding the poorest, unlike the radical democracy of Athens).

Such a regime would have an elite, but they would serve as trustees of the city as a whole, defenders and protectors of its inherited way of life. The exercise of their privileges, such as abundant leisure and education, would accrue to the benefit of the entire city and not merely themselves.

The modern liberal regime, by contrast, tells the talented they own their natural abilities and have a just claim to any rewards they bring. They are encouraged to pursue personal success “while relying upon impersonal mechanisms of the market (classical liberalism) or state (progressive liberalism) to afford some secondary benefits to those who are not so blessed.” This elite enjoys proclaiming its concern for the poor in the abstract, but they carefully avoid any particular obligations. Their uncomprehending fear and hatred of “populists” is only the natural result of such an upbringing.

An older understanding sees individuals as stewards of talents bestowed upon them by God, and of which they are not therefore the exclusive owners. Such unearned talents are meant to benefit not simply their possessors, but society as a whole. Deneen finds this ideal well expressed by St. Paul in I Corinthians 12-13, and traces its influence through John Winthrop to America’s colonial beginnings.

The proper resolution of our present class confrontation is neither the suppression of the populist challenge nor the elimination of elites as such, but a renewed circulation of elites involving the rise of men bred according to this older ideal:

A commitment to progress has rendered us incapable of deliberation about social changes that often disproportionately result in dislocation and instability for the lower classes, and from which elites are insulated. Needed is a new elite that understands its main role as securing the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, an equitable social safety net supportive of these goods, constraints upon corporate power, and a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.

This will involve serious political hardball, for Deneen is under no illusions that the present holders of power are educable.

***

Like folkways within a traditional society, today’s populist revolt percolated from the bottom up, with no guidance from—and against the wishes of—the “conservative movement” headquartered in Washington. Its chosen leader, Donald Trump, does not really understand what he has come to represent. As Deneen points out, he has failed to articulate popular grievances consistently, transform them into sustained policy, or develop a capable leadership class. What the masses like about him is his “trolling” of the liberal elites more than any positive achievement. So it is up to us to fill the gaps.

In the America of the middle of the last century, an ordinary man with no more than a high school diploma and a willingness to work could support a wife and children, buy a freestanding house and car, and take the family to the beach for two weeks every year. To his grandchildren, this sounds like the vision of a lost paradise. It is not because the country has gotten poorer; it is because of structural changes that have favored the few along with their underclass and migrant clientele at the expense of the native white working and even middle class.

While it is not, of course, possible to return to the past, the policies which led to the impoverishment of so much of the productive native population can be rejected and replaced. As Deneen writes:

What is needed is an economic order that seeks conditions for the flourishing of people of all classes, particularly a balancing of change and order that allows for strong families and encourages strong social and civic norms. This will require the development of national economic policies that will displace the primacy of wealth creation for a small number of elites and replace it with a concern for the national distribution of productive work, the expectation of a family-supporting wage for at least one member of a family, and the redistribution of social capital. It should not require wealth to achieve social stability, nor should broad social instability be the acceptable consequence of economic prosperity. A stable and healthy civic society can afford prospects for flourishing even for those in average economic circumstances.

Deneen also correctly observes that the populist movement, in focusing on the failures of its opponents, has disregarded the need to set its own house in order. Today’s working masses are prone to divorce and out-of-wedlock births, devote excessive time to “entertainment,” practice a kind of low-grade consumerism as far as their means allow—or even beyond, racking up consumer debt. Many suffer from various addictions, not all of which can be blamed on the Sackler family. They have weakened their own position by withdrawing from associational life: unions, churches, and civic associations. A new popular regime will have to seek to elevate the masses, not merely restrain the elites.

Much of contemporary populism, in Europe as well as America, focuses on the restoration of national sovereignty and restricting immigration. Regarding the former, we should recall that nationalism was a favorite slogan of progressive liberalism in its vigorous youth, when it was understood as an ideal which would broadening human sympathies beyond their customary parochial attachments. In its present dotage, liberalism despises national attachments themselves as narrowly parochial, and will settle for nothing less than absolute universalism. This vastly exceeds the capacities of a species which evolved in hunter-gatherer bands of between fifty and a hundred persons. The old progressive liberals were correct that even nationalism represented a triumph in the education of the human sentiments. We must return to national particularism as a necessary precondition for the eventual reinvigoration of local civic culture.

A reordering of the regime in view of the common good will require a great reduction in immigration and the repatriation of some recent arrivals. But at this point we come up against an unsurprising weakness in Deneen’s argument: he is utterly innocent of the evolutionary origins of racial differences and racial conflict, and his book is even marred by some boilerplate about “the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” He imagines the popular struggle against the liberal elite might be carried out by a multiracial alliance between immigrants and the native working class. This is a pipe dream: a combination of racial distance and directly opposed economic interests means that our liberal masters’ foreign clients will always view Donald Trump’s supporters as “white racists.” Non-elite founding stock Americans are going to have to fight their own battles.

The triumph of populism will not mean the sudden disappearance of “meritocratic” liberalism, but the latter will shift from being a regime under which we are all forced to live to a mere party forced to compete for power and influence—and a party increasingly on the defensive.