Political philosopher that he is, Patrick Deneen is preoccupied with the eternal question of the few versus the many. How to balance their interests? How to reconcile their differences? He hopes that a “mixed regime” will force the few and the many to learn from each other, while correcting the abuses and excesses of each other.
Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future by Patrick J. Deneen (288 pages, Sentinel, 2023)
Don’t be frightened—or worried—by the title of this book. Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame University is not calling upon the American people to take to the streets. Nor, heaven forbid, is he calling for a genuine insurrection, whether inspired by those on the left or right. And yet is he promoting a radical departure from the current status quo, which, if Deneen is correct, also happens to be a long-standing status quo in many, if not all, respects.
To borrow slightly from presidential candidate Barack Obama on the eve of the 2008 election, Professor Deneen hopes we are heading toward a “fundamental transformation” of the United States of America away from that status quo.
Two key points need to be made immediately. The “fundamental transformation” that Patrick Deneen has in mind is not fundamentally similar to that of our former president. Secondly, Deneen’s hopes are just that: hopes. To be sure, he is convinced that his fundamental change is vitally necessary; hence this book, which seeks to make that very case.
To which US of A is Deneen referring? Is it the United States as it originally existed under the Constitution of 1787? Or is it the United States of today? In a very real sense it is both countries. Or should that simply be the very same country?
Patrick Deneen is not among those conservatives who train their fire exclusively on the progressives of the early twentieth century. He is not content to accuse Theodore Roosevelt and company of hijacking, distorting, and/or subverting the otherwise sublime vision of the Founding Fathers. Nor is he interested in harkening back to the genius of the founders who gave us a limited government of federalism, checks and balances, and carefully divided government.
No, the flaws that have attached themselves to the great American experiment go deeper than all of that. In fact, they seem to be inherent in the very experiment itself.
Deneen’s targets are actually threefold: 1) the classical liberals of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, as well as those of the post-Enlightenment nineteenth century and beyond; 2) the progressives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and 3) the Marxists who have their own vision of a postliberal, meaning highly illiberal, world order.
His villains are a curious mix of all three. In many cases, they are embodied in the same individual. How often have you heard someone describe himself as a social liberal and an economic conservative? We could label them SLIBECONs for short. After all, if there are Paleocons and Neocons, why not Slibecons?
Such individuals take American individualism to be at the heart of the American founding, whether that individualism is expressed in the market place or in one’s personal life. Maximum freedom to do one’s own “thing,” whatever, wherever and whenever, is always the all-American goal.
Marxists, of course, are a different sort of villain in Deneen’s eyes. The Slibecons are their “useful idiots” (to borrow from Lenin) as they pursue their utopian vision of personal bliss, which so far has managed to lead to untold collective horrors instead.
In any case, the “regime change” that Patrick Deneen has in mind is at once post-liberal and pre-Marxist—at least insofar as the United States is concerned. What is required is nothing less than this: “The peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class,” followed by the “creation of a postliberal order in which existing political forms can remain in place, as long as a fundamentally (there’s that word again!) different ethos informs those institutions and the personnel who populate key offices and positions.”
Those are revolutionary words directed at achieving a revolutionary end. How we achieve this revolutionary end without resorting to revolutionary means remains the unanswered question. In all likelihood, it’s also the unanswerable question.
To call for the overthrow of a corrupt ruling class doesn’t sound very much like a call to engage in an entirely—or even a mostly—peaceful process. And will those doing the overthrowing already possess that “fundamentally different ethos” or will they simply impose such an ethos? Or will it somehow evolve out of the ruins of a failed and exhausted American empire? Or is Patrick Deneen simply engaging in his own brand of Marxian style wishful thinking as he calls for his version of the “workers of the world” to unite against his version of the “ruling class?”
Deneen makes no overt claims to utopian sentiments or preoccupations of any sort, but his dissent from, his disappointments with, and yes, his anger at the general state of things in America today leads him in this direction.
Political philosopher that he is, Deneen is preoccupied with the eternal question of the few versus the many. How to balance their interests? How to reconcile their differences?
Those differences aside, whatever faith Deneen still has in our body politic he places in the hands, as well as the hearts and minds, of what might be termed the anti-Slibecons: meaning populist-minded, traditionalist-thinking, religiously-inclined common sense working class Americans. In other words, his favored Americans are Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s clingers to “God and guns.” No doubt many of them are also Joe Biden’s “semi-fascist white nationalists.”
Deneen characterizes them simply as “populist commoners.” As such, they stand against “both sides of liberalism.” They are left of center on economic issues and right of center on social issues; hence anti-slibecons.
So just who are they? FDR’s original working class voters? Truman and Kennedy Democrats? Nixon’s “silent majority?” Reagan Democrats? To be sure, they surely stand against the dominant (maybe even the only?) wing of today’s Democratic party and what was once the dominant wing of the Republican party. That would be the Bush-Dole-McCain-Bush-Romney wing of the party.
Two prominent GOP names are missing here. One (Reagan) is barely mentioned; the other (Trump) figures somewhat more prominently. Neither is a salvific figure. As Deneen sees it, any legitimate and lasting American salvation will have to come from the bottom up.
A chastened American elite can be of assistance in such a project, but only if there is a “regime change” in the direction of the establishment of what Deneen terms a “mixed regime.” Such a regime has little to do with dividing power between the few and the many and everything to do with intermixing the few and the many so as to create an entirely new regime.
As matters stand now, at least in Deneen’s judgment, the gap between his rootless “few” (the highly mobile, well-credentialed, if not necessarily well-educated, elite) and the rooted “many” (the “populist commoners”) has widened to dangerous proportions. Worse than that, both sides sees themselves as “better than they are.” And even more troubling than that, each side is “actually worse than it believes itself to be.”
While Deneen doesn’t say so overtly, it seems quite apparent that he believes the sins of the elite few to be much more grievous than any sins of the many. All in all, his assessment could be seen as a recipe for either a civil war or a peaceful divorce.
Deneen’s goal in writing this book is to help guide the country away from such extremes. His accompanying goal is to bring into being—and into political prominence and power—what he calls “common good conservatism.”
He hopes that such a “mixed regime” will force the few and the many to talk to each other and, ultimately, to learn from each other, while correcting the abuses and excesses of each other. Admittedly, he presumes that most of the listening and learning will need to be done by the elite few, since they have more to learn than do the many. Therefore, it is Deneen’s ultimate hope (there’s that word again!) that the “few” will prove to be willing to learn and thus to be chastened.
Deneen’s proposed vehicle for realizing his hopes steers him in the direction of structural reform. That vehicle is an expanded Congress numbering as many as 6,000 members. Such a number approximates the original ratio of the founders, which was something on the order of one representative for roughly 50,000 citizens. Such a number also suggests that describing a representative body of that size as, say, unwieldy, is almost beside the point.
When Deneen does contemplate the original creation of the founders, he reveals that his sympathies are actually, and not surprisingly, with the Antifederalists. In sum, Patrick Deneen seems inclined to believe that the Madisonian dream of a republic over a large expanse of territory was a mistake from the outset.
Can that mistake be corrected? Patrick Deneen surely hopes so. But let’s be honest. It is, at best, a hope.
To advance his hopes, Deneen calls upon the same individual Ronald Reagan often called upon. That would be John Winthrop and his “city on a hill” sermon aboard the Arbella as it approached the New World.
In the book’s lone reference to Reagan, Deneen gently chides the former president for failing to convey or perhaps failing to so much as grasp the original context of Winthrop’s sermon, the title of which was “A Model of Christian Charity.”
The “model” that Winthrop had in mind was one of shared obligations and duties that each member of the Puritan community had for every other member. As Deneen tells it, Winthrop began by noting that “people have in all times and places been born or placed into low and high stations.” This differentiation was not done to elevate, or reduce, any individual. Rather it was done “for the greater glory of God,” as well as for the greater benefit of the larger community.
In other words, each individual has different gifts, and each individual gift is of potential benefit to others. Hence Winthrop’s—and Deneen’s—larger point: the differences among us should not translate into better or worse; rather those differences should “reveal a deeper unity.”
Here is Deneen at his best and his most hopeful. Ultimately, those hopes reside much more in the hands of the “populist commoners” than in the schemes of the elite. They also reside much more in the possibility, nay the necessity, of a Christian renewal than… well, than not.
And if those hopes for renewal, and for a peaceful transition to a “mixed regime,”are not realized? What then? Well, at some point in the not-too-distant future Patrick Deneen seems to be suggesting that any road to fundamental “regime change” could threaten to become a very rocky road indeed.
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