Out with the old order and in with the new: that is the essential thrust of Patrick Deneen’s 2023 Regime Change. Deneen, a leading advocate of something called “post-liberalism,” announces liberalism’s demise without a hint of regret:
With the dimming of the bright light of liberalism, and with its seeming historical inevitability now relegated to the dustbin of bad theories of history, both the need and the prospect for liberalism’s true and natural opponent arises: a movement that begins with, and is defined by, a rejection of the ideological pursuit of progress along with the baleful political, economic, social, and psychological costs of that pursuit.
Liberalism having been unceremoniously laid to rest, what does Patrick Deneen intend to put in its place? This:
What is needed—and what most ordinary people instinctively seek—is stability, order, continuity, and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word for it, is a conservatism that conserves: a form of liberty no longer abstracted from our places and people, but embedded within duties and mutual obligations; formative institutions in which all can and are expected to participate as shared “social utilities”; an elite that respects and supports the basic commitments and condition of the populace; and a populace that in turn renders its ruling class responsive and responsible to protection of the common good.
It is not difficult in theory to make the case for a society that values “stability, order, [and] continuity”; such a society might well be more sustainable, and less stressful, than a society that values “progress” and the “pursuit of happiness” (to coin a phrase). Mr. Deneen’s problem, however, is that he is either ignorant of, or deliberately oblivious to, the realities of the country in which he lives and for which he prescribes a new socio-political paradigm, which is to say, he ought to read some American history and familiarize himself with the landscape he wants to transform.
Pace Deneen, Americans have never embraced stability, order, and continuity; instead, we have always been rowdy, disorderly, restless, disdainful of the past, and heedless of the future. Having left behind the Old World and its Old ways, we undertook an errand into the wilderness, clearing land, blazing trails, and disposing of inconvenient native inhabitants. We began our official national existence with a revolution; spent decades subduing (exterminating) various stable and traditional indigenous tribes; conducted a bloody civil war; experienced local rebellions and labor unrest of all kinds; and lit out for the territories at the very thought of getting ourselves “sivilized”. We absorbed immigrants from around the world, all of whom wanted to get in on the action. We looked for wars to fight, frontiers to tame, fortunes to find, and something or someone to conquer. We learned never to look back (Satchel Paige, Bob Dylan), in case someone or something might have been gaining on us.
Americans have eagerly embraced change of all kinds, from political to sociological to technological. Given a choice between old-fashioned and newfangled, we rarely hesitated to choose the latter; though, inevitably, some curmudgeons would complain about it. We are tinkerers, improvisers, gadget-makers, and DIY autodidacts. We invented the telephone, the telegraph, the lightbulb, manned flight, the assembly line, and motion pictures; we took the lead in developing machinery for war as well as for peace. We all but patented automotive culture, suburbia, film noir, pulp fiction, television sitcoms, jazz, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll, among much else. For that matter, the sainted right-wing icon Ronald Reagan spent years shilling for a company whose motto was “Progress is our most important product,” and yet he still called himself a “conservative”.
“History is bunk,” according to Henry Ford, arguably the single most influential American of the 20th century. “We don't want tradition,” he added, speaking for an entire nation. “We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.” There is no America that fits Patrick Deneen’s genteel vision, a vision aligned with the English conservatism of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott (and perhaps with the aristocratic Anglophile Russell Kirk), but a vision with no roots at all in this country. Long before Jack Kerouac wrote his hipster saga, Americans have always been on the road, heading down Route 66 and looking for kicks. We are known for, above all else, what Jimmie Rodgers called our "rough and rowdy ways."
Does Patrick Deneen really believe he can get us to settle down?
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Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change (Penguin Publishing Group)
19th-century Americans in search of stability, order, and continuity
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