The motley band that on January 6, 2021, attacked the Capitol in hopes of overturning the election of President Joe Biden and forcibly installing former President Donald Trump as head of state saw itself as simultaneously loyal and rebellious, orderly and lawless. They were “conservatives” but also revolutionaries. They wanted regime change.
A generation earlier, a conservatism that was riotous in this manner would have been dismissed by most Americans as oxymoronic — akin to socialists supporting capitalism or feminists defending patriarchy. After all, the intellectual leader of conservatism at midcentury, William F. Buckley Jr., defined the ideology as a form of gradualism, which cherished and protected the inherited status quo of liberal politics. A true conservative, Buckley famously quipped, was “someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop!”
Few conservatives today are willing to obey Buckley’s exhortation. Instead, those who self-identify as “conservative” have become among the rowdiest promoters of upheaval. This is a crucial context for reading the political scientist Patrick J. Deneen’s book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, which calls on conservatives to use a “raw assertion of political power” and the “force of a threat” in order to topple the liberal order.
Like the January 6 crowd, Deneen styles himself, paradoxically, as both a conservative and a radical. As he puts it halfway through Regime Change, “to constitute a political and social order worth conserving, something revolutionary must first take place.” What that “something” is, and whether it can be rendered either philosophically coherent or ethically desirable, is the question that bedevils Deneen’s politics.
Deneen’s absolute conviction in the inevitability of revolutionary change will be familiar to readers of his previous book, Why Liberalism Failed. Indeed, Regime Change begins by restating that book’s conclusions. Liberalism is “exhausted,” its demise a “historical inevitability.” Corrosive of every form of social life, liberal ideology is an “anti-culture,” a “new tyranny,” a “totalitarian undertaking,” and a “national suicide.” Its notion of freedom is fundamentally disintegrative.
Deneen’s argument that liberalism is doomed to failure has never been very persuasive as a sociological claim. Because ideologies are cultural and not mechanical forces, their fortunes can never be declared with total certainty ahead of time. They might always bounce back due to the creativity, pluck, and force of will of their followers. Why Liberalism Fails thus makes the same mistake as cruder forms of Marxism that posit a predictable progression to history, a sequence of regimes running like boxcars down the tracks of time.
Regime Change, however, is not limited to revisiting the anti-liberal diatribes of Why Liberalism Failed. Instead, Deneen sets himself a far more ambitious task: the mapping of a route to a postliberal future. This constructive project receives various names throughout the book, including mixed constitutionalism, common-good conservatism, and “aristopopulism.”
People are neither naturally liberal nor naturally conservative. Rather, like all human beings, the populace is naturally cultural — and cultures vary over time and place.
Philosophically speaking, Deneen’s alternative vision rests on the idea, inspired by ancient Greek and Roman political thought, for instance Aristotle, that there exists an “age-old contestation” between the “few” and the “many,” which together comprise the “two main parties of every political regime.” This conflict, moreover, takes a predictable form. The “few,” due to their “wealth, position, rank, and status,” can “monopolize the economic and social benefits of the political order,” oppressing the many. Corrupted by their own leisure and luxuries, this elite has a perennial propensity to become “pretentious and effete.”
By contrast, the “many,” while sometimes “crude and parochial,” are also “more likely to be grounded in the realities of a world of limits … in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tides, sun, and stars.” The many are therefore hostile to liberalism’s frenetic disintegration of established traditions and customs. They reject both free markets and individualistic experiments in living. Their preference is instead toward folkways, religion, and morality. They are, in other words, naturally conservative. Rather tellingly, Deneen’s “commoners,” as he calls them, are simply rowdier, less educated, and undisciplined versions of his own favored anti-liberal, Christian, and conservative ideology (this despite the fact that he admits early on that the current populists are, empirically speaking, increasingly living a post-Christian moral reality).
Deneen’s politics, therefore, has as its goal the proper mixing and moderating of the two eternally opposing classes. The many must teach the few to be less permissive and decadent. The few, meanwhile, should lead the many away from overly toxic parochialisms and material degradation. The result of this mutual instruction will be the common good of the whole of society. The many will flourish, and traditional folkways will be preserved. As for the few, they will be made sturdy, virtuous, and civic-minded. They will become true elites, “aristoi,” people of “distinctively good quality.” Eventually, all social problems — from economic inequality to social anomie, racism to ecological devastation — will be ameliorated by the proper balancing of the classes in a mixed constitution.
There is only one problem, in Deneen’s view. This harmonious, common-good future is being blocked by liberal elites. Even if the details are messy, the overall solution is simple: Liberalism as an ideology must be eradicated.
In Regime Change’s central concept of the “few” and the “many,” we encounter one of the deep flaws in Deneen’s thinking. Deneen naturalizes the cultural identity and political dynamics between these two groups. His characterization of this supposedly eternal political opposition can only be sustained by abstracting into a domain of big ideas and “great books,” and away from actual historical reality.
Take one recurrent premise of Deneen’s analysis — namely, that “the many” are naturally conservative and the “embodiment of ‘common sense.’” Such a belief is, of course, wrong on both counts. To offer only one example, the largest electoral realignment in American history was mobilized behind the social and progressive liberalism of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. This ideological tidal wave was not simply popular among a few elites but held sway over vast swaths of Deneen’s populist “many.” At other times, of course, the populace has been more conservative (as during the rise of President Ronald Reagan). The point is that the “many” has no timeless ideological content.
This blunder might have been avoided if Deneen had meditated longer on the fact that the philosopher who gave a central role to the people’s “common sense” was not Aristotle (as Deneen anachronistically suggests) but rather the archliberal author of Common Sense, Thomas Paine. Writing in the 18th century, when liberalism was on the rise, it appeared to Paine that individual rights were so plain and obvious as to constitute the wisdom of the masses. Thomas Jefferson would later echo this sentiment in the American Declaration of Independence, when he dubbed “certain unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” truths that were “self-evident.”
The point is not merely to reverse Deneen and confer natural status of ahistorical common sense onto liberal ideology. To the contrary, such wildly different perceptions of the wisdom of the people simply go to show that political common sense is itself a historical phenomenon. The people are neither naturally liberal nor naturally conservative. Rather, like all human beings, the populace is naturally cultural — and cultures vary over time and place.
Shorn of genuine historical awareness, Deneen’s philosophy suffers. He rests his case on a manifestly false argument from intuition: the naturalness of the politics of “the many.” Even the philosophy of Edmund Burke, which Deneen evokes as vindicating his argument, actually counts against it. For instance, Deneen frequently suggests that “Burke’s conservatism was based on a confidence in the wisdom of ordinary people built up over time.” Yet he fails to consider that what comprised the common sense of Burke’s feudal commoner was an idea of hereditary monarchy as celestially anointed with the power to rule. When Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, famously laments that modern people view kings and queens as ordinary men and women and not supernaturally enchanted beings, he is corroborating how radically the common sense of the people has changed. If anything, the politically “self-evident” today is much closer to Paine’s secular vision of power than Burke’s.
It is a supreme irony of reading Regime Change, apparently lost upon its author, that the true forerunner to Deneen’s appeal to ahistorical common sense is not Burke or Aristotle but the liberal Thomas Paine. Like many ideologues, Deneen has spent so much time fighting with his bête noire that he does not realize the ways in which he has come to resemble his opponent.
Colossal abstractions like “the few” and “the many” allow Deneen to project his own ideology onto the masses. In doing so, he suppresses an underlying problem of revolutionary action (faced long ago by Marxism): namely, from where does radical consciousness arise? Deneen offers a false solution to this problem by simply stipulating that “the people” are already the most devoted partisans of his conservative revolution.
Deneen has spent so much time fighting with his bête noire that he does not realize the ways in which he has come to resemble his opponent.
This is not to say the populace will have no need for elites in a postliberal world. The new elite must be on hand to serve the role of “offering [a] clarifying articulation” of popular “grievances … transforming their resentments into sustained policy.” Deneen’s “self-conscious aristoi” are a rather flattering and immodest self-description — a right-wing equivalent to the Marxist vanguard.
Indeed, despite all the talk of “bottom up” politics, Deneen’s schema is ultimately top down. In this respect, he parallels Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, in which select leadership claims to exclusively channel the authoritative voice of the “real” people. Although Deneen at one point refers to Trump as a “deeply flawed narcissist who at once appealed to the intuitions of the people, but without offering a clarifying articulation of their grievances,” he seems to hope to opportunistically ride the energies awakened by MAGA to a postliberal future.
Once the new symbiosis between leaders and masses has been achieved, Deneen’s “people’s party” can enact a battery of policies like national service, the expansion of representation in the House, and the introduction of intentional randomness in college admissions. But perhaps the most dramatic proposal is for the erection of an explicitly Christian state. The latter will involve reining in liberalism’s experiments in living (particularly, its anti-traditional sexual ethics), as well as its false neutrality and secularism, which contains “unseen theological foundations.”
Unlike liberalism, the new regime will openly integrate religious piety into the state as a “forthright acknowledgement and renewal of the Christian roots” of Western civilization. As part of this project, Deneen promises the state establishment of holidays and policies, modeled on those of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, incentivizing larger families and traditional marriages. These will supposedly create an “ethos of genuine service” as well as a “more-solidaristic economic and social order.”
In Deneen’s imagination, subjects in his future polity will swell with pride at the chance to celebrate the West’s Christian patrimony — rejoicing in state-sanctioned “holy days” and rallying behind massive religious public-works projects that “erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.” Presumably, tax-funded, state-planned religious shrines of this kind will be a morale booster and cause for patriotic fervor.
The idea that millions of non-Christian Americans (along with those Christians who find theocracy repugnant) might respond instead with alienation, disaffection, and dissociation from both the government and the Christian religion is never even entertained by Deneen. Indeed, for a self-described “conservative,” admirer of Burke, and adamant foe of the French Revolution, Deneen does astonishingly little thinking about the unintended consequences of his radical politics. Instead, he preserves an almost childlike credulity in the belief that “Christianity stands to regain importance whenever and wherever liberalism falters.”
What emerges clearly from reading Regime Change is that Deneen has redefined “conservatism” as a form of radical change with little patience or care for the actual existing realities of community and tradition in the United States. No amount of lip service paid to a “multiracial, multiethnic working-class” movement can erase the distinct impression that, should Deneen’s favored politics ever take over the state, it would only do so in the form of a narrowly sectarian, ethnic, and racially inflected politics.
Regime Change is also full of disturbing digressions warning readers of a “totalitarian” plot afoot by progressives and their allies to enact “the effective elimination of whiteness” and of “white, heterosexual Christian men (and anyone sympathizing with them).” Such paranoid and conspiratorial ideas resonate with the ideology of the fascist right, including the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., who in 2017 carried torches and chanted “you will not replace us.”
So perhaps “conservative” is not an appropriate name for Deneen’s politics at all. There is, after all, a longstanding ideological tradition that claims for itself the exclusive voice of “the people” and is at once hierarchical and populist, lawful and violent, nostalgically rooted and restlessly hurled into the hazy mists of an imagined future. But evoking its name would deafen the ears of many readers and bring constructive political dialogue to a grinding halt.