The Failure of Deneen and Dreher in Their Critique of Liberalism

Last year, I wrote a series of posts on Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option and Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (here, here, here, here, and here).  I argued that their critique of liberalism failed at four levels.  They failed to provide an accurate interpretation of liberal political theory.  They failed to analyze the factual evidence of liberalism's performance.  They failed to provide any attractive illiberal alternative to liberal social order.  And they failed to provide any coherent argument for rejecting liberalism.

Recently, their books have been published in paperback editions with new forewords.  I assumed that they would use these new forewords to answer their critics.  I was disappointed when I saw that they had decided not to do that.  Deneen's foreword does end with four pages under the title "Responding to Some Critics" (xx-xxiv).  But he responds in only a very general way without any detailed responses to the particular criticisms that I and others have offered.

My first criticism--their inaccurate interpretation of liberal theory--is mentioned briefly by Deneen in saying that "the book has been criticized for an inaccurate or unfair depiction of 'classical' liberalism" (xx).  But he and Dreher are completely silent about my specific claim that they have failed to develop any good interpretation of John Locke's liberalism.  This is important because they agree that Locke is "the first philosopher of liberalism" (Dineen, 32).

While Deneen insists that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" (39) and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires" (116), he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 
Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Dreher are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about my second criticism--their failure to survey the factual evidence of liberalism's performance.  They say nothing about how the empirical indicators of human freedom correlate with the indicators of human happiness.  They say nothing about the historical evidence that modern liberal cultures have inculcated virtues of self-control that account for the stunning decline in violence over the past 500 years.  They say nothing about how the empirical evidence denies Deneen's claim that liberalism produces "titanic inequality far outstripping the differences between peasant and king" (139): this historical evidence shows that rigid inequality was far higher in medieval Europe than it is today.  They also say nothing about the evidence for social connectedness--social bonds within families and voluntary associations--being high in liberal social orders.

In another post, I have written about the evidence that the level of inequality (as measured by the Gini Coefficient) in some Lockean liberal social orders is close to what it was in hunter-gatherer societies.

Rather than looking at the empirical evidence of what liberalism has done, Deneen and Dreher employ a distinctive rhetorical strategy: they find authors who agree with them in criticizing liberalism, they summarize what these authors say, and then they conclude that this proves that liberalism has failed.  They do not even ask the question of whether the empirical evidence supports what these critics of liberalism say.  And whenever one of their favored authors says something positive about liberalism, they are silent about this.  Deneen's selective reporting of Charles Murray's research is an example of this.

In short, the primary mode of argument for both Deneen and Dreher is begging the question.

My third criticism--the failure to defend any illiberal alternative to liberalism--is acknowledged by Deneen (xxii).  But he doesn't offer any clear answer to this criticism.  

My fourth criticism is that both Deneen and Dreher are incoherent in that while they profess to reject liberalism, they actually embrace the fundamental principles of liberalism--such as voluntarism and religious liberty.

Deneen and Dreher would have a coherent argument for rejecting liberalism if they endorsed the radical Catholic traditionalists like Edmund Waldstein who defend Catholic "integralism" in recommending a return to the medieval theocratic kingdom of Saint Louis IX in 13th century France.  But both Deneen and Dreher reject the medieval illiberal order because of the corruption of the medieval Church, its violent exercise of power, and its failure to secure liberty, equality, and justice.

Deneen and Dreher agree with Alasdair MacIntyre's recommendation at the end of After Virtue that we need "the construction of local forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness."  For Deneen the best example of such "local forms of community" is the Amish communities.  For Dreher such communities can arise whenever families form households organized around private religious schools and traditionalist Christian churches.

All of this depends on religious liberty.  Dreher explains: "Religious liberty is critically important to the Benedict Option.  Without a robust and successful defense of First Amendment protections, Christians will not be able to build the communal institutions that are vital to maintaining our identity and values" (84).  But in their appeal to this liberal principle of religious liberty, Dreher and Deneen contradict their claim to be anti-liberal.

Deneen does say in his new foreword that the political history of the past two years--particularly, the populist revolts against liberal democracy in the United States and Europe--suggests that within the next few years we will see the emergence of a "postliberal political theory," perhaps developed in a book written by one of the young readers of Deneen's book (xxiii-xxiv).  But what will make this new political theory postliberal?

Deneen explains: "the achievements of liberalism must be acknowledged, and the desire to 'return' to a preliberal age must be eschewed.  We must build upon those achievements while abandoning the foundational reasons for its failures.  There can be no going back, only forward" (182).

So what are "the foundational reasons for its failure" that must be abandoned, but without abandoning the "achievements of liberalism"?  Are they the liberal principles of "anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice" (Deneen, 31)?  But as I have pointed out in my previous posts, what Deneen and Dreher scorn as atomistic individualism--human beings living as completely solitary creatures with no social bonds--is rejected by liberals like Locke, Adam Smith, and Friedrich Hayek as "false individualism."  Liberal individualism is actually a communal individualism in which human beings as naturally social animals live as family members, as friends, and in voluntary associations such as schools, churches, and other groups.

Or would Deneen and Dreher say that what must be rejected in a "postliberal political theory" is "the voluntarist conception of choice"?  Deneen observes: "Ironically, given the default choice-based philosophy that liberalism has bequeathed to us, what might someday become a nonvoluntary cultural landscape must be born out of voluntarist intentions, plans, and actions" (192).  What is he saying here?  Is he saying that what start out as voluntary associations must eventually become coercive?  So, for example, while children in Amish communities are now free to choose as adults whether they will stay or leave the community, the "postliberal political theory" of the future will coercively enforce their staying in the community?  Would there be a multiplicity of different communities, in which people would be forced to stay in whatever community in which they were born?  Or would there be only one comprehensive community--perhaps a theocratic Catholic Church--that would constitute the "nonvoluntary cultural landscape"?  So at some point, the Benedict Option will no longer be optional but coercively enforced by law?

But surely this cannot be what Deneen and Dreher are suggesting, because this would abandon "the achievements of liberalism" that come from the voluntarist principle of free choice.  So we are left in a state of total confusion as to what they mean by "postliberal political theory."

As an alternative to Deneen and Dreher, one should consider another modern defender of Christian orthodoxy--C. S. Lewis.  As I have indicated in a previous post (here), Lewis was a Lockean liberal who rejected theocracy as a form of tyranny, who believed that government should not have the power to legally enforce Christian morality, and who thought the only proper aim of government was to secure individual liberty from legal interference except when necessary to prevent harm to others.
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Deneen and others have recently launched a new journal--Postliberal Thought--that will be published both online and in print.  One of the introductory articles is "The Postliberal Moment" by Andrew Willard Jones, which concludes:

"Christianity has deep resources from which to draw. Christianity has the depths from which to offer a meta-critique and the solutions that can save all that was good and right in modernity. If modernity is indeed a Christian heresy, then orthodoxy contains its strengths and even its pathos, but without its exaggerated errors. Within a recasting of the liberal lexicon in terms of a Christian lexicon, liberalism itself, like the Christian heresies that have come before it, is capable of some measure of redemption."

"We are launching Postliberal Thought in order to provide a place for this work. We understand the project to be the work of generations and we are fully aware that by breaking free from the dominant paradigm, we thrust ourselves into areas of intellectual instability and obscurity. Much of what we propose will often no doubt turn out to be mistaken; many of the roads we go down will no doubt turn out to be dead-ends. Postliberal Thought is therefore a place for open-minds and forgiving spirits. We hope to forge a community of Christian thinkers who are animated not by certainty concerning what to do or what to think, but by the hope that we, humbled in prayer before God, will find a way forward."

I find it hard to understand what he is saying, because, like Deneen and Dreher, he seems to be caught in the incoherent position of both denying and affirming liberalism.  Jones is the author of a book--Before Church and State--defending the "Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX" in 13th century France as "the most Christian kingdom."  Wouldn't his position be more coherent if he simply argued for the illiberal regime ruled by Saint Louis as being the model of the best regime designed to secure both the temporal and eternal ends of human life?  In doing this, he would be embracing the Catholic theocratic authoritarianism of the French Counter-Enlightenment that began with Joseph de Maistre and then was renewed by Charles Maurras and the Action francaise.

In identifying liberal modernity as a "Christian heresy," is he referring to Protestant Christianity?  Would postliberal thought require the persecution and suppression of all thought contrary to medieval Catholic social thought, which would deny Vatican II's affirmation of religious liberty?  Would communitarian Christian groups like the Amish have to be persecuted because they arose from the heresy of Anabaptism, which interprets the New Testament as teaching separation of Church and State ("Render unto Caesar . . .") and religious liberty, so that Christian communities must be based on the voluntary consent of the adult members?

Patrick Deneen Is a Liberal. Really.

A few years ago, I wrote a long series of posts on Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (2018).  Now, I am thinking about his new book--Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future--that has just been published.

I have been reading Deneen's writings for many years.  For most of that time, I have been bothered by the feeling that I was missing something.  Only recently, I figured out what I have been missing.  

Dineen is not what he pretends to be.  As indicated by his new book, he claims to be an enemy of liberalism, who is proposing a radical "regime change" that would overthrow the liberal regime and replace it with an illiberal regime.  But if you read him carefully, you will see that while he enjoys posing as an opponent of liberalism, he is being dishonest, because he is actually a liberal.

This explains why he fails to make good arguments against liberalism and for a truly illiberal alternative to liberalism.  His arguments are weak because his heart is not in it.

If you read him carefully, you will see that there are many points in his book where the reader would expect him to defend some radically illiberal practices and principles that would destroy the liberal social order, but then he refuses to do that.  The only explanation for this is that his profession of belief in illiberalism is insincere, because he is a secret liberal.

For example, consider what Dineen says about the legal enforcement of religious belief and practice, which is crucial for any illiberal regime that must reject the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.  I will point to three illustrations--his account of Thomas Aquinas's "common-good conservatism," his defense of John Winthrop's Puritan governance in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and what he says about the Lockean liberalism of the U. S. Constitution as it bears on the legal status of religion.

THOMAS AQUINAS ON THE LEGAL ENFORCEMENT OF CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY

Deneen repeatedly identifies Thomas Aquinas as one of the major proponents of the "common-good conservatism" that Dineen professes to be the best illiberal alternative to liberalism (x, xiii, xv, 46, 48, 96, 125, 131-33, 165).  Any reader who knows something about what Aquinas recommended for the legal enforcement of Christianity would expect Dineen to endorse this as important for his illiberal conservatism.  Remarkably, however, far from endorsing this teaching, Dineen passes over it in silence.

For example, to the question of "Should heretics be tolerated?" Aquinas's answer was no (ST, II-II, q. 11, a. 3).  He explained: heretics "by their sins indeed deserved to be both separated from the church by excommunication and excluded from the world by death.  For it is a more serious crime to corrupt the faith, which gives life to the soul, than to counterfeit money, which supports earthly life.  And so if secular rulers justly put counterfeiters and other felons immediately to death, much more could heretics be both excommunicated and justly killed immediately upon conviction of heresy."  

Thus, Aquinas supported the Inquisition in its mission of investigating and killing heretics.  In 1233, Pope Gregory IX had given the Dominicans the supreme authority over the Inquisition.  Aquinas was himself a Dominican.

This is part of the illiberal conservatism of people like Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), who argued that all stable government requires belief in its absolute divine authority as enforced by the persecution of heretics who deny Christian orthodoxy.  De Maistre defended the violent persecution of heretics by the Spanish Inquisition as necessary to protect Spain from the heresy of Protestantism.

Now, this is a truly illiberal alternative to the liberal doctrines of religious liberty and toleration.  But Dineen says nothing about this.  He says nothing about Aquinas's justification for killing heretics, and he does not even mention de Maistre, who was the true founder of illiberal conservatism.

Today, the most prominent proponents of illiberal Thomistic political thought are the Catholic Integralists, who see Aquinas as expressing the social order of the medieval Christian Kingdom--particularly, the "Most Christian Kingdom" of St. Louis IX in France--in which there was no separation of Church and State, but an integrated fusion of secular and sacred order (Jones 2017).  Remarkably, Dineen says nothing about whether he agrees with the Integralists, although he does defend "postliberal integration" against "liberal separation" (187-237).

As far as I can see, the only good explanation for Dineen's evasiveness is that he cannot bring himself to openly endorse such radically illiberal principles as the fusion of Church and State because he is really a liberal, who believes in religious liberty and toleration.

THE AMERICAN PURITAN FOUNDING:  JOHN WINTHROP VERSUS ROGER WILLIAMS

John Winthrop was an English Puritan lawyer and one of the leading founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.  Deneen points to Winthrop and particularly his "Model of Christian Charity" sermon on the need for the Puritans to be "one body" in their organic wholeness as a community.   Deneen presents this as an expression of that common-good conservatism of the American Puritans that constituted the other American Founding--the illiberal Christian founding--that provides an alternative to the Lockean liberal Founding expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787 (193-198).

Dineen's readers might then expect that he would explain and defend the illiberal legal principles for enforcing Christian orthodoxy that prevailed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  His readers might also expect that he would defend the illiberal Puritanism of Winthrop and others against the criticisms of liberal Puritans led by Roger Williams.  But, again, Dineen is silent about all of this.  He says nothing about the illiberal jurisprudence of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  And he does not even mention Roger Williams.

The "Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" (1647) is a codification of laws for Massachusetts that functioned as a constitution for the colony.  Much of it comes from the theocratic regime of the Mosaic laws in the Old Testament (particularly, the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy).  For example, the section on capital crimes includes the following (Lutz [ed.] 1998, 102):

"If any man after legal conviction shall HAVE OR WORSHIP any other God, but the LORD GOD: he shall be put to death.  Exod. 22. 20.  Deut. 13.6, 10.  Deut. 17. 2. 6."

"2. If any man or woman be a WITCH, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death.  Exod. 22. 18.  Levit. 20. 27.  Deut. 18.10. 11."

"3. If any person within this Jurisdiction whether Christian or Paan shall willingly and willingly presume to BLASPHEME the holy Name of God, Father, Son or Holy-Ghost, with direct, expresse, presumptuous, or highhanded blasphemy, either by wilfull or obstinate denying the true god, or his Creation, or Governments of the world: or shall curse God in like manner, or reproach the holy religion of god as if it were but a politick device to keep ignorant men in awe; or shal utter any other kinde of Blasphemy of the like nature and degree they shall be put to death.  Levit. 24.15.16.

. . .

"8. If any man LYETH WITH MAN-KINDE as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination, they both shal surely be put to death: unles the one partie were forced (or be under fourteen years of age in which case he shall be seveerly punished) Levit. 20. 13."

"9. If any person commit ADULTERIE with a married or espoused wife; the Adulterer and Adulteresse shall surely be put to death.  Lev. 20. 19. and 18. 20. Deu. 22. 23. 27."

Capital punishment for adulterers, homosexuals, witches, blasphemers, and those who refuse to worship God in the right way.  Kill them all.  Christians killing Christians for worshiping Christ in the wrong way. That's what a truly illiberal legal system looks like.  

So, when Dineen praises the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a model for the illiberal Puritan regime in America, his readers would expect him to praise these laws of Massachusetts and recommend them for his new illiberal regime for America.  Surprisingly, he is totally silent about them.  And his readers must wonder what his silence means.

His readers must also wonder why he is silent about the debate between John Winthrop and Roger Williams over the Mosaic theocracy that was established in Massachusetts.

A few months after Winthrop planted the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, Williams, a Puritan clergyman, brought his family from England to the colony.  He was welcomed by Winthrop as a "godly minister."  Williams and Winthrop largely agreed in their Calvinist theology.  But while Winthrop and the other leaders of the colony believed that the government must be an Old Testament theocracy that coercively enforces the true Christian religion by punishing pagans, apostates, heretics, and atheists, Williams believed that the New Testament taught that there must be a separation of church and state that protects "soul liberty"--the freedom of conscience that is the right of all individuals.  Williams was the first person to use the term "wall of separation."  And while Winthrop and the others believed that the authority of the Massachusetts government was ordained by God, Williams believed that earthly government was based on the free consent of the people without any divine authority.  Government was to serve "civil interests" rather than "spiritual interests."  This showed the split between the illiberal Puritanism of Winthrop and the liberal Puritanism of Williams (Barry 2012).

Previously, I have written about why I think Williams was right in showing the Biblical basis for liberal Christianity, particularly as rooted in the New Testament in opposition to the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament.

In 1635, Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  He fled south to Narragansett Bay, where he bought some land from the Narragansett Indians and established a settlement that he called Providence, which later became the colony and state of Rhode Island.

In 1637, Williams and a dozen or so families drafted a political compact for Providence that they all signed.  They agreed that each of the men would have an equal vote in its governance.  Remarkably, there was no mention of God--unlike all the other founding documents of every other English settlement--and the new government was said to serve the "public good . . . only in civil things" (Lutz, 162).  So this was the first government in the New World to be based on the separation of Church and State and the "soul liberty" of all individuals.

In 1644, Williams published his masterpiece--The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for cause of Conscience, Discussed, in A Conference betweene Truth and Peace.  This 400-page book was one of the most comprehensive treatises about the freedom of religion ever written, and it became one of the classics of liberal political thought.  It exercised a pervasive influence on later writings defending religious liberty, such as John Locke's Letter on Toleration (1689).

It is surprising, therefore, that in identifying Winthrop as the illiberal Puritan founder of American political thought, Deneen says nothing about Williams and about this founding debate between illiberal and liberal Puritanism.  Deneen's readers must wonder why he did not want to defend the illiberal theocracy of Winthrop against the arguments of Williams for liberal Christianity.

Deneen cannot say anything about this debate between Winthrop and Williams, because if he did, he would have to recognize the contradiction between the liberal voluntarism of the Reformed Protestant covenantal community espoused by Williams and Winthrop's call for organic wholeness.  Central to Puritan theology is the idea of covenants--between God and man and between men in society--that rest on free choice.  As Perry Miller observed (in The New England Mind): "The individual voluntarily promised to obey civil and scriptural laws, for the seventeenth-century Puritans believed that meaningful obedience could only grow out of voluntary consent, never out of coercion."  Thus, Winthrop's attempt to form his followers into one body ran against the voluntarist grain of Puritanism that was expressed by Williams.  Deneen does not want to explicitly take a side in this debate, because if he did, he would have to admit that he is on the side of liberal voluntarism.

"NO RELIGIOUS TEST" IN THE CONSTITUTION

Deneen's readers must also wonder why, in taking the side of the Antifederalists in their criticisms of the Constitution of 1787, Deneen says nothing about those Antifederalists who attacked the "no religious test" clause of the Constitution as a denial of America's identity as a "Christian nation" (Deneen 2023, 95, 123, 168-73).

Article 6, section 3, of the Constitution stipulates that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."  Previously, I have written about the importance of this clause in establishing the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration for the United States.

Before the adoption of the Constitution, most of the states had a religious test requiring that the officers of government be Protestant Christians, and thus excluding Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and atheists.  In some cases, even dissenting Protestants were excluded.  With the passage of Thomas Jefferson's Statute on Religious Freedom in Virginia in 1786, Virginia became the first state to protect religious liberty.

But then, in the decades after the adoption of the Constitution, all of the states dropped religious tests for office and those other provision of their constitutions that established state churches and punished those outside the established church.

In the Ratification Debates, some of the Antifederalists objected to the "no religious test" clause.  For example, at the North Carolina convention, David Caldwell objected to this as "an invitation for Jews, and Pagans of every kind, to come among us," and he worried that "this might endanger the character of the United States" (Bailyn 1993, 2:908).

If Deneen is rejecting the liberal principles of the Constitution, why doesn't he argue against the "no religious test" clause and argue for illiberal religious tests that would exclude non-Protestants from public office?  Does this suggest that he does not want to openly deny the liberal principle of religious liberty because he is actually a secret liberal who rejects the illiberal theocracy of a politically enforced religion?  Certainly, as a Catholic, Deneen would want to defend religious liberty for Catholics in a predominantly Protestant America.

So Dineen must be a liberal.

SIX FAILING ARGUMENTS

If Dineen really is a liberal, that would explain why his attempts at arguing against liberalism fail.  I see at least six failures.

He fails to provide accurate interpretations of liberal political theory.

He fails to exercise any critical judgment in reading his favorite authors who criticize liberalism.

He fails to consider empirical evidence for liberalism's success.

He fails to provide a coherent argument against liberalism.

He fails to see how the American Founding established a true "mixed regime."

And he fails to provide any attractive illiberal alternative to liberal social order.

I will examine these failures in my future posts.

REFERENCES

Bailyn, Bernard, ed.  1993.  The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification.  2 vols.  New York: Library of America.

Barry, John M.  2012.  Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty.  New York: Viking.

Deneen, Patrick.  2018.  Why Liberalism Failed.  New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

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

Jones, Andrew Willard.  2017.  Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX. Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Academic.

Lutz, Donald S., ed.  1998.  Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Williams, Roger.  1963.  The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution.  ln The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, vol. 3 of 7.  New York: Russell and Russell.

Patrick Deneen's Sophistical Account of the Power Elite

 In my posts on Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, I identified his sophistical rhetorical strategy of begging the question:  throughout his writing, he makes assertions as if they were obviously true (often by quoting or paraphrasing from some authors who agree with him) without offering any proof and without explaining or replying to the best objections to his position.  In Regime Change, he employs the same sophistical technique.

For example, the second chapter is entitled "The Power Elite."  The idea of the Power Elite--that there is one, and only one, ruling class that is socially uniform and unified in purpose that rules over the United States, and perhaps even over the whole world--is a crucial claim of his argument.  He does not tell his readers that this term the Power Elite was invented by C. Wright Mills in his book The Power Elite (1956).  Nor does he tell his readers that there were many powerful criticisms of this book.  Moreover, Deneen does not reply to these criticisms or offer any empirical evidence that Mills was correct in his account of the Power Elite.  Deneen simply asserts the truth of this idea as if it were so obvious that he need not make any effort to substantiate it.

According to Mills, the members of three kinds of American elites--business, political, and military--cooperate to make all of the crucial decisions for the nation.  Their ability to act in common as the Power Elite depends on their social uniformity: they have the same socioeconomic, educational, and professional backgrounds that set them apart from the rest of the nation.

But some of the sociologists who study elites disagreed with Mills.  For example, Suzanne Keller (in Beyond the Ruling Class) argued for "elite pluralism"--"a diversified, heterogeneous set of elites instead of the monolith that had been assumed heretofore" (xiii).  She pointed out that Mills' own data did not support his claim about the social uniformity of American elites because his biographical data showed striking dissimilarities in their backgrounds, education, careers, and religious beliefs (108-109).

Does Deneen have the evidence proving that Mills was right about the Power Elite and Keller was wrong? We don't know because he says nothing about this debate.

Deneen does say that the Power Elite is socially uniform because they all belong to what James Burnham called "the Managerial Elite" (27-39).  And one "defining feature of this new elite is its near-complete dissociation of the new class from the lower and working classes" (36).

One manifestation of this complete separation of the Power Elite from the lower and working classes is the division of the American electorate--particularly in the election of 2020--"between a dominantly credentialed professional class, on the one hand, and an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic working class, on the other" (156-157).  On the one side, those supporting Joe Biden "were dominated by members of the credentialed professional class."  On the other side, those supporting Donald Trump were "largely noncollege credentialed, hourly or self-employed, private-sector rank-and-file union members, and generally working class."  What we see here is "the few against the many, or oligarchy vs. demos.  In such a condition, the foreseeable future is one in which the mass and the elite remain locked in a prolonged adversarial contest" (158).  Biden is on the side of the few who belong to the elite, while Trump is on the side of the many who constitute the mass.

But is that true?  If Biden is on the side of the few and not the many, why did he win the popular vote?  And why did Trump lose the popular vote both in 2016 and 2020? Does Dineen identify the "few" as actually the majority of the voters, and the "many" as actually a minority?  Does the majority of the American electorate belong to, or at least support, the Power Elite?  Dineen doesn't explain this.

Moreover, if the "largely noncollege credentialed" were on the side of Trump, then one would have expected that most if not all of those voters without college degrees would have voted for Trump rather than Biden.  That did not happen.  Why?

It is true that some of the analysts of the 2020 election thought they saw a "diploma divide," with the Biden voters being more likely to have a college diploma.  But that's not exactly true.  In 2020, only 35% of the registered voters had a college degree, while 65% did not.  So, obviously, any candidate or party that would appeal only to the college educated would lose.  

Of the voters with a college degree, 42% voted for Trump, 55% voted for Biden.  Of the voters with no college degree, 49% went to Trump, and 49% to Biden.  If Dineen is right that the "largely noncollege credentialed" were for Trump, why did half of them vote against Trump?  Dineen doesn't explain this.  Nor does he explain how the party alignment can be understood as "the few against the many," when the majority of the voters are on the side of the "few."

What we see here is the fundamental incoherence in Trump's populist rhetoric, which I have noted previously.  The populists assert a stark opposition between the Elites and the People.  But then a large portion, perhaps even a majority, of the People belong to or support the Elites.

On Deneen (1): The Liberalism of Happiness and Declining Violence

Steve Pinker's Enlightenment Now and Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed seem to belong to two different worlds. 

Pinker argues for the stunning success of the Liberal Enlightenment as shown by massive factual evidence (conveyed in 73 charts of statistical data) of human progress over the past 200 years: because of liberalism today more human beings are living longer, healthier, wealthier, freer, safer, more stimulating, and happier lives than human beings have ever lived at any time in history. 

Deneen argues for the utter failure of liberalism as shown by cultural critics of the liberal order:  because of liberalism today human beings are living lonely, resentful, alienated, boring, meaningless, and generally desperately unhappy lives.

You see what I mean by two different worlds--the world of liberal progress and the world of liberal failure?  Actually, Deneen's world is paradoxical in that he argues that liberalism has failed because it has succeeded: the successful triumph of liberalism in the modern world has manifested the destructiveness of the logic of liberal thought in abolishing the healthy practices and institutions of traditional forms of social life in promoting the degrading life of materialist individualism.

To settle this dispute, we need to judge the three levels of argument in this debate.  The first level of argument is about how to interpret liberal political theory.  The second level is about analyzing the factual evidence of liberalism's practical performance--its success or failure.  The third level is about assessing the illiberal alternatives to liberal order.

In this post, I will consider the second level--the factual evidence.  In subsequent posts, I will consider the other two levels of the debate.

Pinker relies much more on factual evidence than does Deneen, which shows the differences in their academic positions.  As a professor of psychology at Harvard who sees himself as a natural scientist, Pinker believes that the best source of knowledge is the modern scientific method of testing hypotheses by how well they explain the empirical data of human experience of the natural world.  He must also study the history of political philosophy in developing his argument for the classical liberal political philosophy that culminated in the Enlightenment, but he sees that philosophic position as making empirical claims about human nature and human history that must be tested by scientific research.

Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame who specializes in the study of the history of political philosophy, which he sees as devoted primarily to the interpretation of classic texts of political philosophy from Plato to the present.  But he also recognizes that applying that philosophic knowledge to modern social and political life requires some appeal to empirical evidence for the success or failure of the liberal order and other regimes.

Deneen's book is similar in some ways to Steven Smith's recent book--Modernity and Its Discontents--which I have written about (here).  Like Deneen, Smith makes a Straussian argument against liberal modernity, although Smith is more explicit in his appeal to Leo Strauss.

The thesis of Smith's book is "that modernity has created within itself a rhetoric of antimodernity that has taken philosophical, literary, and political forms" in denouncing the bourgeois life as "a kind of low-minded materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism" (xi).  He thinks that he proves this thesis by restating what some of the antibourgeois writers have asserted in their attacks on bourgeois liberalism.  But as I have observed, while this proves the existence of an antibourgeois rhetoric, it does not prove the truth of this rhetoric as confirmed by empirical evidence of what life is like in the Bourgeois Era.  Smith says that the goals of bourgeois liberalism are no longer credible, because "leading opinion has increasingly lost confidence in these goals" (4).  But then he never wonders whether "leading opinion" might be wrong.

Similarly, Deneen insists that there is "a long tradition of cultural criticism" directed against liberalism and the liberal view of technology (95).  Deneen cites lots of cultural critics of liberalism--from Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Wendell Berry.  But as with Smith, it's not clear how the mere existence of such anti-liberal cultural critics proves the truth of their criticisms.  Presumably, if Deneen is to show us the truth of their claims about the failure of liberalism, he would need to show us the confirmation of those claims by factual evidence.  But he does not do that because, like Smith, Deneen's principal mode of argument is to beg the question.

According to Deneen, liberalism "generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom" (3). Liberalism results in "the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources" (41).  It depletes material resources such as fossil fuels, and it creates climate change that will destroy human civilization.  It depletes moral self-command by teaching that there should be no moral restraint on selfish individualism in the endless competitive pursuit of hedonistic self-gratification without any concern for the good of others.  It also depletes moral self-command by driving students away from the liberal arts education that has traditionally formed the moral and religious character of a free people through a Western humanistic education. Liberal individualism also breaks all of the social bonds of family life, friendship, and local communities.  But since human beings are naturally social beings, this asocial individualism of the liberal order renders human beings deeply unhappy in their loneliness and social isolation. 

Is this a factually accurate description of life in a liberal social order?  Deneen does not ask that question.  Nor does he want his readers to ask it.  Because he is a dogmatic thinker who seeks not so much to convince us as to convert us to his unshakeable conviction that liberalism has failed.

HAPPINESS

If Deneen is right, then we should expect to see evidence that people in liberal societies today are generally unhappy, because liberalism frustrates the deepest longings of human nature, while people in illiberal societies are generally happy, because those human longings are satisfied.

There are at least four separate analyses of data for measuring human happiness.  The Gallup Organization, the World Values Survey, and the World Happiness Report (found online) present data on countries around the world (see Pinker 2018, 262-89).  The General Social Survey has gathered data for the United States. 

In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray defends an Aristotelian conception of happiness as lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole; and he uses data from the General Social Survey to show that self-reported happiness among Americans is associated with four kinds of virtues--marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity.  I have written about Murray's argument here. 

Oddly, Deneen discusses Murray's book, in speaking about inequality in America, but without mentioning Murray's analysis of the data on happiness among Americans (Deneen, 134, 149-53).  Deneen endorses Aristotle's account in the Nicomachean Ethics of how the moral and intellectual virtues promote human happiness or flourishing (eudaimonia), but he says nothing about how Murray uses empirical evidence of happiness to support this Aristotelian understanding as applied to the American liberal order (Deneen, 35).

Much of the data on happiness is based on self-reports of well-being: people are asked how happy they are, or they are asked to rank their life satisfaction on a scale from 0 to 10.  Although we might wonder about the reliability of such self-reporting, it does correlate with other signs of happiness, such as smiling, having a joyful demeanor, and judgments by other people.

The World Happiness Report 2017 (WHR) ranks the happiness of 155 countries based on answers from 3,000 respondents in each of those countries.  Respondents were asked to evaluate their lives on a ladder where 0 represents the worst possible life and 10 the best possible.  Three-quarters of the differences among countries were accounted for by differences in six key variables.  "These six factors are GDP per capita, healthy years of life expectancy, social support (as measured by having someone to count on in times of trouble), trust (as measured by a perceived absence of corruption in government and business), perceived freedom to make life decisions, and generosity (as measured by recent donations).  The top ten countries rank highly on all six of these factors" (WHR, 3).

I have written about the Human Freedom Index (HFI) (here), which applies a classical liberal conception of freedom in measuring human freedom--both personal freedom and economic freedom--for 159 countries.  The strong correlation between the ranking in the HFI and the ranking in the WHR suggests that people in liberal social orders with the greatest levels of freedom are also generally the happiest people.

Here are some of the rankings of happiness in the WHR with corresponding rankings of freedom in the HFI in parentheses:

1.  Norway (7)
2.  Denmark (8)
3.  Iceland (31)
4.  Switzerland (1)
5.  Finland (6)
6.  Netherlands (9)
7.  Canada (11)
8.  New Zealand (3)
9.  Australia (5)
10. Sweden (13)

14. United States (17)

16. Germany (16)

19. United Kingdom (9)

25. Mexico (73)
26. Singapore (18)

31. France (33)

34. Spain (30)

49. Russia (126)

79. China (130)

82. Venezuela (158)

108. Iran (154)

151. Rwanda (65)
152. Syria (159)
153. Tanzania (99)
154. Burundi (150)
155. Central African Republic (151)

This is empirical evidence against Deneen's critique of liberalism, unless he can show that there is something wrong with this evidence.  He has not done that, because he has chosen to remain silent about this evidence.

The general pattern seems clear: the liberal regimes tend to be high in both freedom and happiness, and the illiberal regimes tend to be low.  7 of the countries ranked in the top 10 of the Human Freedom Index are also in the top 10 of the Human Happiness Report.

If Deneen is right about liberalism making people deeply unhappy, one might expect this to be indicated by a high rate of suicide, since this is the most dramatic way in which people express their unhappiness.  And, indeed, some critics of liberalism, like Emile Durkheim, have made this claim.  But as Pinker points out, the data don't support this.  Plotting the data for suicides in England, Switzerland, and the United States from 1860 to 2014 shows that the rate of suicide has declined in all three countries (Pinker 2018, 279).  And remember that Switzerland ranks number 1 on the Human Freedom Index.  For these three liberal countries, suicide was more common in the past than it is today, which is not what someone like Deneen would predict.

DECLINING VIOLENCE AND INCREASING SELF-CONTROL
Deneen claims that in a liberal order, people tend to lack "moral self-command."  One observable manifestation of moral self-command is when people refrain from attacking and killing other people.  Remarkably, Deneen is totally silent about the evidence presented by Pinker (2011) and others (Eisner 2014; Muchembled 2012; Sharpe 2016) that from high rates of violence and homicide in the Middle Ages, there has been a long decline in modern liberal societies, which shows that liberalism actually does promote moral self-command, and that people in pre-modern illiberal societies suffered from a lack of self-control.

One of the best-supported generalizations in the science of criminology is that the propensity to crime--and particularly violent crime--is increased with any loss or weakening of self-control.  And so, for example, young men between the ages of 16 and 30 show on average a higher propensity to violent crime because their impulsive personalities incline them to lose self-control, and any factor that increases that propensity in young men increases the rate of violent crime (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985).  Therefore, if Deneen were right about liberalism promoting a loss of self-control, we would expect a steady increase of criminal violence in the history of liberal social orders.  That we see just the opposite is powerful evidence against Deneen's claim.

Manuel Eisner (2014) is a criminologist who has assembled the History of Homicide Database, which is the most comprehensive collection of quantitative estimates of homicide levels from 1200 to the present.  His data show that the average estimates of homicide rates across Europe from 1200 to about 1450 converge at a rate of about 27 per 100,000 inhabitants.  This average rate then begins to decline: 20.1 (1500-1549), 12.0 (1600-1649), 5.5 (1700-1749), 3.5 (1800-1825), 2.0 (1900-1924), and 1.0 (2000-2012).  So, over a period of 500 years, the peacetime criminal homicide rate in Europe fell by half every century.

Eisner's data also show that most of this decline in homicide rates was due to a fall in lethal male-to-male fighting of about 99%!

Eisner thinks that the best explanation for this dramatic drop in homicidal violence in Europe over the past 500 years is that there was what Norbert Elias called a "civilizing process" (Elias 2000; Linklater and Mennell 2010).  European societies went through a change by which average levels of self-control, standards of decency, and disgust for open displays of cruelty tended to increase, which arose from the move away from the Middle Ages to European modernity. 

Elias presented various kinds of historical evidence for this civilizing process.  For example, he analyzed books on manners to see how these books taught new standards of civilized behavior.  He noted, for instance, that in medieval Europe, ordinary people often stabbed each other over insults at the dinner table; and the new books on manners tried to change this.

Eisner presents quantitative data analysis that supports Elias's theory.  For example, he shows a strong correlation between increasing book production and decreasing homicide rates.  Every 10% increase in book production is associated with a 3.4% reduction in homicide rates, and these two variables share almost 54% of the variance.  The countries that had the highest per capita book production by 1750-1799--England, the Netherlands, and Sweden--had also reached the lowest levels of homicide rates.  By contrast, countries such as Italy and Spain, with lower literacy and book production, had higher homicide rates. Although correlation does not prove causation, one can infer from this that literacy and the reading of books tends to inculcate habits of self-control.

Eisner also presents quantitative data to support the application of Elias's theory to the fluctuations in violent crime rates around the world from 1950 to 2010.  Beginning in the 1960s, there was a steep rise in violent crime across North America and Europe.  Then, in the early 1990s, there began a steep drop in violent crime.  And by 2010, crimes rates were lower than they ever had been.  Some social scientists, such as Fukuyama (1999) and Pinker (2011), have argued that this showed cultural changes in which there was a decline and then a revival of self-control.

To find data on these cultural trends, Eisner has used the Google Books NGAM corpus, which is a database of 8 million digitized books published between 1500 and 2008, with an interface that allows users to track the frequency of any group of words as a percentage of all words in the corpus over a specified period of time.  Eisner tracked three groups of words that might express hedonistic preferences--words concerned with "sex," "drugs," and "narcissism."  He also tracked four groups of words that relate to self-control--words concerned with "shame," "politeness and good manners," "conscientiousness," and "honesty." 

He found that the frequency of the hedonistic words increased during the years that the homicide rate was increasing and decreased during the years that the homicide rate was decreasing.  He found the opposite pattern for the frequency of the self-control words, which declined when homicide rates increased, and increased when homicide rates decreased.  This can be seen as indicating a culture shift that brought declining self-control in the 1960s and rising self-control in the 1990s, which is correlated with crime rates rising and declining.

As another quantitative data base that might show this culture shift, Eisner has used German opinion poll surveys from 1967 to 2010 asking Germans about what values they thought parents should teach their children.  There were three items related to self-control--"politeness and good manners," "doing work diligently and properly," and "being thrifty in money matters."

Eisner found that the endorsement of values of self-control was weak during the years of increasing homicide rates and strong during the years of decreasing homicide rates.

Contrary to Deneen's claim that modern liberalism must destroy the moral virtues of self-control, this historical evidence suggests that modern liberal cultures can and have inculcated habits of self-control that account for the stunning decline in violence over the past few centuries.

In my next posts, I will consider other kinds of evidence relevant to liberalism's influence on social life, education, inequality, and the environment.


REFERENCES

Eisner, Manuel. 2014. "From Swords to Words: Does Macro-Level Change in Self-Control Predict Long-Term Variation in Levels of Homicide?" Crime and Justice 43 (2014): 65-134.

Elias, Norbert. 2000. The Civilizing Process. Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1999. The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. New York: Free Press.

Linklater, Andrew, and Stephen Mennell. 2010. "Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations--An Overview and Assessment." History and Theory 49 (October): 384-411.

Muchembled, Robert. 2012. A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present. Cambridge, MA: Polity.

Sharpe, James. 2016. A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England. London: Random House Books.

Wilson, James Q., and Richard Herrnstein. 1985. Crime and Human Nature.  New York: Simon and Schuster.