American Realignment
Patrick Deneen answers questions from Belgium's Doorbraak Magazine
Journalist Roan Asselman from Doorbraak magazine posed the following questions to Patrick Deneen. His answers - in Dutch - were published in a recent issue here, and the original English text is made available to PLO subscribers, below:
DB: Typically, the individual and the state are perceived as being in opposition to oneanother. In your book, Why Liberalism Failed, you argue that this is not the case. Could you elaborate on this perspective?
PJD: According to liberal philosophy, humans are by nature autonomous free individuals. The theory holds that the state comes into being in order to protect their individual rights. If and when the state exceeds that mandate, it becomes an oppressive force limiting the natural rights of individuals, and needs to be trimmed back.
Of course, the theory of naturally free human beings is completely false:
humans are deeply interconnected creatures whose lives are made possible by mutual need and obligations, not autonomy. Liberal practice in fact ends up as a project in which humans are to be liberated from those natural obligations, replaced by increasingly impersonal relationships. The state (along with a globalized market) becomes the main force that creates the conditions for liberation from family, community, churches, and ultimately even nations. Thus, a powerful and expansive state is needed to create the individual, contrary to liberal theory (which holds that humans are naturally individuals).
The ”successes” of the liberal order advances this paradox: the more it creates individuals, the more individuals come to rely upon the state; and the more powerful the state becomes, the more insecure, weak, and less free individuals become. As we approach the apex of the liberal order, we are both less connected (hence more free) as individuals, and weaker (and hence less free) in our isolation. As liberalism succeeds, liberalism fails.
DB: The political landscape, both in the United States and Europe, is often characterized asa battle between “conservatives”; and “progressives.” Interestingly, you use the terms “progressive liberals” and “conservative liberals” to describe much of the politicalestablishment in the United States. This implies a similarity between these two types of‘liberals’.
PJD: Until Trump’s electoral victory, this was absolutely the case, and even today remains a powerful organizing principle within the mainstream organizations of American politics. Building off my last answer, liberalism advances historically in two stages. The first stage forefronts the ideal of the rugged natural individual who supports the creation of a limited state in order to secure individual rights; the second stage advances the ideal that the true individual only emerges when liberation is assisted by a powerful state. Both approaches embrace the ideal end of the liberated individual, but differ over the means. The two liberal parties will engage in tempestuous debates over those means (especially the respective priority given to free markets vs. the role of government in realizing the ideal of the liberated individual), but the goal of individual liberation, which they share, will always be mutually advanced.
With the rise of populist movements that have rejected this liberationist ethos – emphasizing instead shared national fates and the need for political and economic solidarity – these supposedly “opposite” right and left liberal parties have been revealed to have been a “uniparty” all along – with Never Trumpers becoming Democrats, and a variety of “Grand Coalitions” forming throughout Europe (e.g., Germany) to prevent a genuine challenge to liberalism.
DB: Some conservatives dismiss wealth inequality as irrelevant, arguing that the general economic trajectory of Western countries shows increasing GDPs. They contend that since fewer people are poor, the wealth gap between the rich and the poor is less significant. Whatis your perspective on this viewpoint?
PJD: This perspective is an operating assumption of classical liberalism, sometimes called falsely called “conservatism” in the U.S., or “neo-liberalism” by the left (which is, in fact, not “neo” at all). Classical liberalism advanced the belief that economic inequality was the result of the natural liberation of individuals, in which natural inequalities would result in economic differentiation. While this was potentially politically destabilizing, classical liberals argued that the overall positive benefits of growing prosperity to society would outweigh negative political discontent and instability. The phrase “a rising tide raises all boats” was invoked both by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as a shorthand explanation of how everyone stood to benefit from economic inequality.
A major result of this philosophy has been the creation of an oligarchy that increasingly separates itself from those who are deemed economic “losers.” Economic solidarity is discarded and replaced by a zero-sum ethos of winners vs. losers. The “rising tide” was increasingly benefiting only the “winners,” who regarded the losers as having earned their fates. The resulting division in U.S. society has been the source of deep political divisions that ultimately elicited in the elections of Donald Trump. Once again, the “uniparty” sought to maintain the oligarchic arrangements of the individualistic liberal order, but was defeated by a successful political uprising of the working class.
DB: The Vice President of the United States has cited you as one of his major influences,and Politico referred to you as “one of the seven intellectual forces behind JD Vance’sworldview.” Do you perceive a shift away from liberal orthodoxy in the new Republican Party?
PJD: What is often characterized as “populism” is, in fact, a form of democratic anti-liberalism, or what I have termed “common good conservatism.” It rejects both the economic individualism of classical liberalism and the individualism of progressive liberalism (especially radical emancipatory beliefs connected to the sexual revolution and its hostility to family, community, and nation). Vice-President Vance is the first major political figure in the U.S. who has deeply comprehended the faulty basis and results of both individualisms, an understanding he arrived at first from his challenging experience growing up in Appalachia, and then as someone who began reading and deeply studying the sources and alternatives to the liberal condition that had destroyed the working class of his home region. His position constitutes a rejection of both “faces” of liberalism, right and left, and therefore a new alignment in U.S. politics.
DB: Some members of the current administration regard the bureaucracy and civil service asentities to be dismantled. However, you have expressed a different perspective.
PJD: The current administration is united in its belief that the “progressive” agenda of the U.S. bureaucracy and beyond – today at the core of elite American institutions (e.g., media and education) - needs to be defeated and dismantled. There is disagreement ultimately on whether that dismantling means simply “getting rid of government,” or erecting a conservative alternative in its place. This division roughly runs between the “tech world” libertarianism represented by Elon Musk, and the MAGA demand for a more nationalist economy and renewal of American civic life articulated by Steve Bannon. While these two positions might be thought to be opposites, the actual unfolding of priorities in the new administration will be one of ongoing negotiation and trial-and-error in which both tactics will be simultaneously pursued. In some cases, there will simply be dismantling of progressive institutions, as in the case of USAID. In other cases, there will be efforts to use the federal government to positively advance a conservative agenda, as I expect we will see in economic policies that advances economic nationalism; support for family formation; and a shift in the aims of education in a more conservative direction. The apparent division is minimized due to its shared opposition to progressivism, and an underlying agreement that there will be specific “lanes” for each.
I clicked "like" on this out of respect for Patrick and the thought he provokes, not because I always "like" what he says (and I am a founding member of his "Postliberal Order").
Patrick's critique of liberalism here builds on a caricature. Liberal philosophy, at its best, has never claimed that human beings are isolated atoms. Rather, it starts from the moral intuition that individuals matter—not in abstraction, but in the concrete dignity of persons situated in relationships. The notion of rights is not a denial of obligation but a framework for negotiating it fairly. Liberal thinkers from Mill to Berlin have acknowledged that autonomy is shaped, constrained, and enabled by social life.
To suggest that liberalism aims to “liberate” humans from natural obligations misreads the tradition. Liberalism does not dissolve community; it insists that affiliation must not be coerced. Voluntary bonds are not weaker for being chosen. That the liberal state sometimes steps in where traditional forms of support have eroded is not evidence of contradiction, but of adaptation to changing circumstances—some emancipatory, some painful.
Yes, there is a paradox in modern freedom. But paradox is not failure. It is the price of a system that seeks to balance autonomy with mutual dependence, liberty with solidarity—never perfectly, but often more humanely than the systems that promise wholeness by force.
excellent summary