When Deneen, who teaches political science at Notre Dame, writes of “liberalism,” he isn’t writing about the views held by contemporary Democratic politicians or self-described “progressives” (at least not directly). Instead, he has in mind the governing philosophy that animated the American Founders and has defined America ever since, influencing modern conservatives and liberals alike.
Ironically, as Deneen observes, the growth of individual freedom is connected to the growth of the state. The state moves into more and more areas of life to ensure people remain “free.” In other words: “Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism.”
The trouble is, liberalism doesn’t let us define justice in a substantive way. It’s defined by whomever wins the most votes. It becomes utterly dependent on time and place.
To put it in my own way, the Founders did not give us the Bible. They gave us the wisdom of man. And the wisdom of man works in some situations, but not in others (see Eccl. 3:1–8). God’s wisdom we must hold with a tight grip, man’s with a loose grip. Deneen’s book helps us loosen our grip and not take everything we’ve received for granted.
Today’s populist and nationalist movements suggest that liberalism is failing in certain significant respects—not because it has betrayed its own principles, but because it is being true to itself and is now experiencing the contradictions and absurdities inherent in its inner logic.
A proper education, as Deneen rightly stresses, will help us to recover a better understanding of liberty as “self-rule and disciplined self-command” rather than the current notion of liberty as “the absence of restraints upon one’s desire” (116).
Deneen suggests that a critical mass of such disturbing questions has been reached:
The “Noble Lie” of liberalism is shattering because it continues to be believed and defended by those who benefit from it, while it is increasingly seen as a lie, and not an especially noble one, by the new servant class that liberalism has produced.
Deneen addresses the crisis of liberalism from every angle—from the cozy partnership between international financiers and the overbearing welfare state, to the diminishment of modern life by certain kinds of consumer technology, to the perversion of liberal arts education into a recruitment program for the global elite.
The same situation I’m in.Sounds like a book I need to read; along with something like 45 other books…