REGIME CHANGE

A manifesto against liberalism in favor of a “mixed constitution.”

According to political scientist Deneen, the author of Why Liberalism Failed, it’s the fault of liberalism, to which he assigns a right and left wing, that urban elites scorn the farmers and factory workers of flyover country. It’s the fault of liberalism that no one goes to church anymore and that old-fashioned education has fallen to multiculturalism, identity politics, or any other ideology that “insist[s] that an individual or group’s perceptions of offense ought to replace appeals to any shared understanding of justice as a constraint upon tyrannical power.” That tyrannical power, of course, is the purview of the liberal elite, the people who don’t like Trump or Brexit. A little of this proposition that liberals hate “the people” goes a long way, and Deneen’s insistence that his so-called mixed constitution will level the differences between the elite and the masses is an assertion that longs for more convincing evidence. It’s unfortunate that one of the examples of family-friendly, birth-rate–promoting government that Deneen holds up is the far-right Orban regime of Hungary. It’s even more unfortunate that the conservatism it upholds is a counter to the “ethos of cosmopolitanism,” that last term being a historic antisemitic dog whistle, whether Deneen intends it that way or not. For his part, while Pope Francis may be a tad bit too liberal, Deneen seems quite happy at the thought of a Catholic state at whose vanguard is an aristocracy formed by “a kind of Aristotelian habituation in virtue.” One suspects that Deneen would find William F. Buckley too left-wing for the post-liberal regime he hopes will push aside the immoral, amoral politics of liberalism and reinvigorate “an exhausted Western civilization” through family, religion, and patriotism.

Just the thing for those who use the word woke without knowing what it means.