Clay Tech

"clay-works make things real"

translated from clazytech.com

Liberalism Failed Because It Succeeded, Not Because It Failed

original Society & Ideas

I’ve come to feel that in recent years phrases like “the failure of capitalism” and “the collapse of democracy” have started showing up everywhere as a kind of trend. I wanted to get a proper grip on what’s behind this.

I dug through a number of books on the subject, and this one struck me as the most sound and reasonably argued of the bunch. I’m putting together these notes mainly for my own reference.

Why Liberalism Failed

Why Liberalism Failed

The author, Patrick J. Deneen, is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame in the US. He has also taught at Princeton and Georgetown.

The content is dense, so this will run long and I’ll split it across several posts.

The argument

Liberalism (or liberal democracy) emerged after the medieval aristocratic order and went on to swallow the world. An anti-liberal current of thought ran through the 19th century, and various alternative systems of rule were tried, communism among them, but liberalism outlasted all of them and seemed to seize hegemony as the world’s only viable political system. Even so, a number of distortions have surfaced one after another in recent years, and liberalism is once again shaking. The main points are “ever-widening inequality,” “individuals growing weaker while the state grows stronger,” and “the decline of morals.” The crucial, deeply troubling point is that none of this is the result of liberalism’s failure. It is the result of liberalism’s success. Liberalism was always destined to end up this way, yet the world has arrived here without abandoning it and without managing to build a sufficient alternative, and left alone, it will surely keep on this same course.

I want to organize what follows around the point that individuals keep growing weaker while the state keeps growing stronger.

The shadow falling over liberalism

Liberalism first sprouted in the Renaissance. An idea that had existed for 500 years was realized 250 years ago with the founding of America, then spread outward to other countries. When liberal democracy rose up, people thought representatives chosen by everyone through elections would get rid of the aristocratic class, and they put that into practice.

Liberalism’s achievements:

Francis Fukuyama declared in 1989 that the long debate over the ideal system had ended. From the 2000s onward, though, he began writing things that contradict that claim.

Now citizens think the class that has replaced the aristocracy is far worse than the aristocracy ever was.

Ever since liberalism was established, it has kept destroying countless social norms and religious customs. It has built a meritocratic society where only those who have something give thanks for it, and the era in which Americans enjoyed that freedom is now fading: 70% of Americans feel that America’s peak is over.

Statism and individualism are the same thing

Put into words this might sound strange, but statism and individualism are the same thing, or rather, two wheels moving in the same direction. Statism and individualism have in fact grown by propping each other up. Both drive liberalism forward.

What American politics calls conservatives and progressives can be restated as classical liberals and progressive liberals. Conservatives believe in market principles and aim to achieve individualism by pursuing small government. Progressives reject that and believe that advancing state involvement will ultimately deliver individualism too. But both share the same foundation.

Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651): a liberated individual expects the state to hold social norms in check. In a state made up only of self-sufficient individuals, the individual ends up held in check by the state instead.

Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835): individualism is the cause of statism. Individualism ultimately leaves a person with no one to turn to in times of trouble.

Concerns that existed from the very founding of liberalism are now actually landing on us.

Relying on the state

It’s hard for an individual to protect themselves alone, so people form groups. The ability to skillfully control groups is said to be one reason Homo sapiens survived. But in a society where liberalism has thoroughly permeated, individuals remain exposed to all kinds of threats. There is no group to rely on, no trustworthy cultural norm exists, and people come to think the state, the only thing left to rely on, should control everything through law.

Once relationships with local organizations grow thin, loneliness and confusion make people want to merge instead with something distant: the state. Ties to family, community, religion and culture get singled out as an evil that obstructs economic independence, and avoiding them only deepens the loneliness, until people become heavily dependent on the one organization that still seems legitimate: the state. This happens gradually.

That’s the reason fascism raged in the first half of the 20th century, 150 years after liberalism began spreading.

Madison, on “extending the sphere,” explained that setting citizens against one another and making solidarity difficult would promote certain interests. Without cohesion, people have no choice but to leave everything to the ruling class. People are made to give up on the public sphere and pushed toward pursuing only personal ambition, and the state promotes and supports exactly that. A country that grows wealthy this way then has to fear invasion from other countries, and the scale of that threat is unpredictable, so the state must be granted unlimited power or it won’t be able to respond when the emergency comes.

Human beings are naturally drawn to affection for what is close by. That should mean local government rather than central government; that’s how it ought to work. But if “excellent state management” makes local areas unable to be attractive, by controlling taxation and budgets, talented people naturally gather at the center, and that imbalance accelerates. Weakening local government moves things further toward statism, but this is thought to serve individualism as well.

In recent years, the possibilities of technology, and in a certain sense its threat, have become a perfect motif for this.

The Amish

The Amish, a Protestant sect, are known for being anti-technology. Theirs is a community that values self-sufficiency, and within Amish communities, building a barn together is an event that strengthens communal bonds. Whether or not to adopt a technology is decided by whether it serves the community. Some choices, like zippers or automobiles, might make you tilt your head, but what’s interesting is insurance. The Amish think the community itself is the insurance, and that insurance run by a business is unnecessary. Under the conventional structure of insurance, you have no way of seeing whose needs the insurance you paid for actually serves, no visibility into who you owe an obligation or responsibility to. It’s an extremely irresponsible structure.

Liberalism’s childish misunderstanding: “humans are inherently good”

The people who drove early liberalism believed, in a nearly naive way, that placing people into a philosophical “state of nature” would lead to correct outcomes.

They argued there was no problem in moving from ancient liberty, liberty grounded in virtue, to modern liberty, the pursuit of every liberated freedom. This is nothing but the naivety of believing human beings are by nature free and self-sufficient. They must have had no children, and must have forgotten their own childhood.

The “individual detached from all constraints” never actually existed in a state of nature. It has been artificially manufactured by the power of the liberal state. Can such individuals hold proper norms and act in an orderly way? Can they act to serve humanity and the state from a long-term perspective? The results are being thrust in front of us right now.

The decline of norms around courtship and marriage, systems that support prioritizing individual independence whether married or unmarried, children becoming an ever-greater burden, falling birth rates.

The absence of norms necessarily calls for stronger laws, which necessarily calls for a surveillance society.

The Soviet novelist Solzhenitsyn (1979): “You cannot criticize someone who has broken no law. A society has come into being with no voluntary self-restraint.”

Community as the remedy

The thinker Wendell Berry holds that community is built on trust, goodwill, self-restraint, patience, empathy, and tolerance. It is a place of limits. A healthy home life is essential; the discipline of home life keeps people from drifting into a narrow self-sufficiency. Educational institutions grounded in community can also resist the sovereignty of the state. A community worries together, as a whole, about the upbringing of the children born into it. The “public good” can only really hold together within a narrow community. Once it grows too broad, problems inevitably get abstracted, and distortions inevitably appear in reality.

When Tocqueville visited America in 1830, he was struck by how enthusiastically Americans threw themselves into local activity. His theory of the township: self-government is something brought about through long practice and long argument. The handling of public matters by the people can certainly be clumsy at times, but unless people repeat that practice and train at it, they cannot escape subjugation to a distant government. There is actually little chance that whatever democracy decides will turn out to be the right conclusion, but he argued that unless people keep engaging with politics this way, their position will eventually become no different from that of a slave. Life in the polis: the discipline of solving problems locally through self-government. The habit of self-restraint and self-discipline. The cultivation of political judgment.

Running a household economy means thrift and frugality. Making things yourself, doing things yourself. A home vegetable garden is a good example. Understanding nature’s gifts and human limits. Human beings joining nature’s rhythms and celebrating them.

Staying away from abstraction and indifference. Consumption keeps growing more and more anonymous. When you keep money circulating locally, you can see plainly who it goes to and what it gets used for. You can properly perceive the structure of society.

The cultivated, learned capacity to sacrifice one’s own narrow personal interest for the sake of other people.

The realization of self-government and mutual education.

In terms of contemporary political philosophy: communitarianism, republicanism, or Burkeanism, a way of living that values old customs.

Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option as resistance to counterculture, and the reconstruction of culture and community, large-scale farms among the examples.

Freedom is exhausting

Young people are raised with only two options: compete, or fall into the abyss. “The winner is both the one running the con and the one being conned.” You con others in order to win, but you yourself have been conned by the notion that winning is right.

There is in fact no real choice within liberalism. Universities mass-produce people given a practical education stripped of religion, human rights issues, and the like, and those people, even as they become high earners, grow dissatisfied with society and with inequality. Universities then line up the next batch of similar material, whatever seems practical at the moment, to make it look as though they’ve reformed.

Living inside liberalism, we merely choose between an iPhone and a Galaxy, having half abandoned the choice of whether a smartphone is useful in the first place. Which of the two is truly free?

Hobbes: “Man keeps wanting more and more, and it is only by dying that this finally comes to an end.”

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/10/369/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.