Jonah Goldberg has a lengthy review of Patrick Deneen’s new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, in the Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty. (Samuel Goldman’s review in the current issue of NR is here.) Unsurprisingly, the author of Suicide of the West is unimpressed with the case that the modern West has been a bad idea, given its enormous advances in both the material conditions of life and the liberty of the individual. Deneen and his ilk have a point, of course, that the worldly conditions of medieval serfs — including the omnipresence of death and the total absence of hope of earthly advancement — was conducive to a richer spiritual life. The argument between this life and the next one cannot be resolved in empirical terms. But try selling that as a system of political economy to anyone who isn’t already convinced by the premise.

In the meantime, the brass tacks of earthly reality matter. As Jonah notes, the sort of thing that Deneen and other New New New New Right thinkers are proposing is entirely impractical in 21st-century American politics (or, for that matter, the 21st-century politics of most places in Europe or the Anglosphere):

I’d find this more worrying if I thought this tiny cadre of reactionary malcontents could get a poliberal integralist elected dogcatcher. . . . Deneen derides “fusionism” as the elitist “top down conservatism” that he seeks to dethrone. . . . This is a profoundly elitist, almost cartoonish understanding of how elites operate and what fusionism was. Frank Meyer, the primary author of fusionism, argued that the tensions between liberty and order, freedom and virtue, the individual and the collective, were deeply embedded in the DNA of Western civilization in general and the Anglo-American tradition in particular. And he was right. The idea that you can easily translate the ideas of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Polybius into an alternative 21st century regime that erases or supplants the deeply embedded cultural preferences of Americans is otherworldly. The best an American political movement can hope to do is tease out aspects of their thought that complement the American character.

As I’ve observed in another corner of this debate, “Any ‘national’ conservatism ought to reflect the nation it seeks to conserve. Scarcely anything is more characteristically American than the insistence of even the humblest individual that he or she has rights, liberties, freedoms that the state cannot touch.” Likewise, any plan to impose a post-liberal order of the Right through the administrative state requires you to assume away the people who actually staff the administrative state. In either event, what today’s so-called New Right prescribes is entirely utopian: It describes a desired end-state of the world without even a vaguely practical roadmap to get there and with no acknowledgment that doing so requires not only destroying our current institutions but replacing our nation’s existing people and culture.

A lot of this vein of literature, which scarcely existed before 2015, consists of overreading the (highly uneven) political success of one man, Donald Trump, and converting that into a worldview about the practicality of doing various things that Trump himself has been conspicuously unsuccessful at doing. The New Right’s only real response when practical objections are raised is the perennial cry of the utopian that things are now so bad that anything else would be better (even, famously, analogizing the nation to an airplane that needs to be flown into the ground, killing everyone on board). That way lies all of the worst decisions in human history. It starts with “imagine a better world,” proceeds to “hold my beer,” and ends with the gulag and the guillotine.

Here’s the great irony: The core of the New Right’s brief against classical liberalism — and against American conservative defenses of it — is framed in practical terms. These ideals may sound good, they argue, but they are unsustainable. Give men liberty, and they become libertines and materialists; produce libertines and materialists, and you get progressives; and progressives destroy the very liberty you seek to conserve as well as the institutions that tried to infuse liberty with virtue. In this telling, the problem with a classical-liberal society is not that it is bad, but that it is impossible, or in any event, unsustainable. The prescribed solution is to abandon the arms and armor of classical liberalism and fight progressivism with . . . something different. But that “something different” cannot be built without a different people and a different culture, which must come from . . . where? Now, I am all in favor of thinking creatively about how to frame new and more effective ways to combat the Left within the broad framework of the classical American political tradition, and within our constitutional system of government. But a critique that purports to be more realist than its opposite number should grapple more seriously with reality.