The book is Why Liberalism Failed. I wrote this:
This being 2018, Deneen also points to the electoral successes of Donald Trump and the Brexit plebiscite as signs that the liberal order has lost its appeal with the general public. But these less-than-overwhelming victories did not clearly rest on the above failures of liberalism that are Deneen’s concerns. The featured cause in the Trump and Brexit campaigns was control over immigration. The issues of government agency over-reach, economic inequality, liberal arts education, and climate change played little or no role in either.
Although the book makes many good points, overall I didn’t think that the dots were well connected.
I would argue economic inequality is one of the drivers behind the immigration backlash. If you feel as though you are falling behind (and many are), it is a normal reaction to look for culprits…particularly if they add to the labor supply in a time of stagnant real wages.
Mixed results from a 2008 survey by U. of Michigan researchers:
“[P]eople with serious concerns about their own economic situation were more likely to agree that immigration hurts the job prospects of the native-born. At the same time, low-income workers and the unemployed didn’t show more negative feelings about immigration than other groups in the population.”
A 2016 Morning Consult poll also cast doubt on the ‘economic anxiety’ theory:
“Asked about why they’re concerned about immigration, 26 percent of survey respondents cited national security as a key reason. That didn’t change even among participants in difficult economic situations who might be expected to be more concerned about their job prospects. Parsing out working-class voters (defined by people without a college degree) and low-income participants (defined by people making under $50,000), both categories of participants were still more likely to say their top concern was immigrants hurting national security over immigrants weakening the economy.”
(I’d include links, but that seems to get comments stuck in moderation.)
“It seems we are becoming less and less charitable to those with whom we disagree. People impugn their opponents’ motives, mock their intelligence, and question their right to be heard. It is hard to reconcile such polarized political conduct with the ideals of liberalism.”
For me the puzzle is, why the kabuki of still holding elections? Why is there still that single slim pretence left?
Plenty of people have zero commitment to the free market of ideas. The one final step is to say out loud not simply that this election result or this referendum result must be overturned but that there should be no more elections. Jack Dorsey says there should only be Democrats. Republicans must be eliminated entirely. But he still likes the name “Democrat” and he sees nothing paradoxical in the idea of a one-party democracy with no opposition.
Plenty of people felt that way too in France and Britain and America in 1917 and in 1933. But they took the last step, stopped paying lip-service to any idea of democracy, and dropped the fig-leaf of still holding elections. They said openly that parliamentarism should be done away with, that politics was a mere talking shop, and democracy an outdated, 19th-century sham. Civilization, as Pound said, was an old bitch gone in the teeth. Why the pretence, now, from Pound’s heirs? If they don’t actually believe in the alternation of power, or its peaceful transfer, or in debate and discussion and using words to win arguments, what’s stopping them from saying out loud that they aren’t democrats? Why go through the motions of acting out the stage play of voting and counting the votes?
On immigration, there is some unknown maximum rate of immigration plus assimilation. The faster the assimilation, the more immigration is tolerable and tolerated.
Liberalism DOES fail, when liberals assert that unlimited immigration of non-liberal, and anti-liberal people is acceptable, and such folk do not need to assimilate (and become liberal). This is also a failing of Open Border Libertarians — and as M. Friedman often said, the US can’t have open borders plus gov’t welfare. He argued long and usefully against excessive welfare, yet the dishonest socialists, giving away free money, continue to attract huge support. Even with Venezuela as a slo-mo socialist disaster.
If Deneen isn’t talking about excess immigration and elite support for socialism, he’s not talking about it’s current failures.
Finally, many of the problems of too much bad gov’t in the US are likely to be fixed by bipartisan Reps & Dems as long as Dems remain out of the White House, so have far less abusive power and more fear of it.
It’s good to identify the need for virtue. The Dems, especially, need to be policing their own insult spewing celebrities, politicians, and newsfolk.
One of the problems with elections is if the result is very nearly balanced. More expensive, but maybe hold the election again and again until one side or the other has a 60% majority?
Migration control is really a very silly subject. Considering the world a century ago when people couldn’t travel as cheaply as today, it would take several days to get from one end of the island of Great Britain to the other. Yet people could move about freely and relocate if they wanted to. Now almost anywhere on Earth is accessible within 24hrs at a cost available to anyone in work – provided they have the right papers. But people can’t even relocate within the former British Empire let alone totally different countries.
Xenophobia is a very serious problem for humanity. It is is that that needs tackling beyond all else, before the entire species becomes extinct as a result.
Maybe xenophobia is a byproduct of evolution and survival of the fittest, and is the reason for the Fermi Paradox. (Why there are no signs of intelligent life in the universe.)
I simple view of Patrick Deneen book is Liberalism succeeded so well that people are slowly withdrawing from religion and he has no real solutions to change this trend. (I don’t disagree with some of religion thoughts: family formation in capitalistic liberal societies is really slow and we are depending upon my public school teachers on teaching values to students. I still the center of Japan’s and now Euorpe’s problem is a lack of labor supply.)
The aspect of Immigration and TRADE on Brexit (which included both Muslim and Polish immigration) and Trump helped win the ‘right’ set of working class voters. I think that trade needs to be included with Trump’s victory. And PM May has no real plan for Brexit, probably because London will lose some of its advantage of London financial distinct, and Trump’s trade policies are beyond confusing.
Concerning the latter, I cringed when I came across this: Our carbon-saturated world is the hangover of a 150-year party in which, until the very end, we believed we had achieved the liberation from nature’s constraints.
Yeah, slightly off topic, but I was listening to a podcast with Bret Weinstein the other night and he was saying something about how he couldn’t believe how humanity hadn’t woken up to the environmental peril it was in after the catastrophes we’d already seen. The interviewer asked him what catastrophes he was referring to, and the first example he gave was Hurricane Katrina. A city built below sea level flooding during a storm isn’t exactly evidence of a coming apocalypse, B-Dubya! What is it that causes otherwise smart people to say such stupid things?
Again, I wish had more time to devote to this. The subject is hugely important and Deneen’s book at least takes a decent, if ultimately incorrect, stab at the very real problem, and it hopefully sets off a broader discussion.
Some quick points.
1. You are right about the elections and immigration and the climate stuff, and Deneen is off base on those.
2. Deneen (and sometimes Dreher and others of that type: 50+, Social conservative religious traditionalists) are stuck in the ‘Relativist’ frame (cf: “Relativism and the Study of Man” – 1961) which goes back well over a century now but which started to fade away during the early “New Left” era. They are beating a distracting dead horse, where there is a live one running around winning the race.
Ask: Does it make sense that virtue is being undermines to critically low levels at the same time that “virtue signalling” is exploding in frequency of usage as a legitimate complaint over a dominant type and social phenomenon in our society, almost as if a certain kind of virtue is being strongly emphasized by nearly all high status people?
Furthermore, does it make sense to say that it’s still all about choice and self-interest and the emancipation and liberation of individuals from authority, when even ‘liberals’ are completely eager for state authority to impose various behavioral and speech rules on everybody, according to their moral vision?
All the relativism and principled (as opposed to boutique) multiculturalism was an intermediate phase of the dispersion of a minority elite ideology into the cultural mainstream until it established sufficient power and dominance to encourage proponents to switch gears, and to dispense with the velvet glove covering the iron fist when no longer necessary or expedient. Compare to the liberal evolution from free speech absolutists to ruthless speech police.
3. On whether we can solve the problems of liberalism with more liberalism, one might ask how, which raises the deeper and much debated question of how it came about at all in the first place. One thing we can observe is that, at least for a time, liberalism was more or less culturally self-sustaining, even during those periods of adversity you mentioned. It would take a while to explain why, but my position is that the self-sustaining social mechanism has run out of juice in the process of being replaced by a rival ideology, and so, despite our technologically-enabled economic prosperity, liberalism really is in more danger than in those dangerous times, and there is no longer any ‘soft’ (or coherent) way to implement ‘more liberalism’ solutions.
Lets use academic economics as an example, which you have described as being on the Road to Sociology. Whatever kept academic economics (and perhaps once even kept sociology) in anything even remotely approaching an intellectually healthy condition seems to be fading away with no clear reason to hope for improvement. If you start to think about “Why didn’t it keep itself going, keep itself even barely ‘healthy’?” you will come to answers that resemble what can be said for liberalism too.
Tremendous comment. Particularly on the description of relativism as a dead horse. Or maybe we should regard cultural relativism as a protective spirit: shamans can conjure it when needed to attack claims of Western/Bourgeois superiority, but it otherwise lies quiet in the grave while rigorous supremacy of another culture is asserted. (that culture being, for lack of a better term, elite liberal arts college-ism )
Maybe instead of the failure of liberalism we are observing one motivating ethical background replacing another within a liberal context. We are losing Christian-influenced civic nationalism, and replacing it with elite liberal arts college-ist universalism. So the definitions of social norm-breaking shifts. But the general liberal political structure remains largely intact, and citizens enjoy substantial personal liberty. No one from the government shows up to steal your stuff, or put you in jail for talking. Although if you break norms you can get ostracized/fired. And because the norms are shifting lots of people get blown up, or have to issue pathetic retractions of beliefs 90% of the country held twenty (10? 5?) years ago.
The insurance net concept is unstable given the the sheer size, not to mention the severe state skew.
Engaging in insurance payments at this scale is not a constant return. We attempt it and we cause mass migrations, moving generations back and fourth as government concentrates services differently. War crime if it is not proportional voting, which the senate is not.
Another skewness issue is the California legal system where free assembly takes a back seat to states rights. California is huge, and this legal twist is quite at odds with english law, practiced farther eat. And more basic rights and constitution issues come up as California exercises is domination of the House liberals. I see these fundamental issue appear twice, and it won;t be the last. The right of California to implement a state SS system vs interstate commerce. California will will win and shake up finance.
The other issue was, by the way,the right of an elected official to advocate for a non union issue, on his own time and money. A reserved right, over ruled by the unelected unions, via state’s rights. This is a hard one to overcome, even for the US supremes because California pays a ton of taxes and has a ton of House votes. That is dangerous.
We will see more of these.