His book is a "radical" critique of Enlightenment liberalism. Arguing that it has failed, is currently in its death throes, and we must work towards building the political system & society that will come next.
His basic thesis is that liberalism has steadily eroded the norms civilization needs to function—family, local community, local religious practice, and local culture in general—in its pursuit of maximizing the redefined "liberty" of the individual. Liberalism redefined liberty as the ability to pursue to the maximum one's personal desires and pleasures, while the ancients and Christendom rightly understood that liberty was the result of self-mastery, the cultivation of virtue in being able to restrain your base impulses. The right ("classical liberals") and the left (progressives) have both worked in tandem furthering this "liberty." Rightists have worked to maximize that "liberty" of free choice economically, destroying local ties in communities via enforcing the international free market, and progressives have worked to maximize that liberty in choosing one's identity, particularity as it relates to sexuality and gender. Both have worked to destroy the many levels of bonds (family, community, religious) that society requires to function because they worked as a restraint on the atomized individual's liberty to pursue their immediate wants. The people grow increasingly opposed as its failures become more undeniable & it is forced to use more and more statism to replace the cultural mores it has destroyed.
Introduction:
"Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has “become more fully itself,” as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology. A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom. Its success can be measured by its achievement of the opposite of what we have believed it would achieve."
"even as liberalism has penetrated nearly every nation on earth, its vision of human liberty seems increasingly to be a taunt rather than a promise. Far from celebrating the utopic freedom at the “end of history” that seemed within grasp when the last competing ideology fell in 1989, humanity comprehensively shaped by liberalism is today burdened by the miseries of its successes. It pervasively finds itself to be caught in a trap of its own making, entangled in the very apparatus that was supposed to grant pure and unmitigated freedom. We can see this today especially in four distinct but connected areas of our common life: politics and government, economics, education, and science and technology. In each of these domains, liberalism has transformed human institutions in the name of expanding liberty and increasing our mastery and control of our fates. And in each case, widespread anger and deepening discontent have arisen from the spreading realization that the vehicles of our liberation have become iron cages of our captivity."
Politics:
"Citizens of advanced liberal democracies are in near revolt against their own governments, the “establishment,” and the politicians they have themselves selected as their leaders and representatives. Overwhelming majorities regard their governments as distant and unresponsive, captured by the wealthy, and ruling solely for the advantage of the powerful."
Economics:
Liberalism has generated previously unfathomable levels of wealth, but it has created titanic inequality and discontent from the losers in the new economic system.
"As the reactions in the urban centers to the outcome of the Brexit vote and the election of Donald J. Trump evince, those same leaders are shocked that the terms of the social contract appear not to be acceptable to Walmart shoppers. Still, nothing can finally be done, for globalization is an inevitable process, unstoppable by any individual or nation…Whether people want the world “reaching into” individuals, corporations, and nation states is not a matter for discussion, for the process cannot be stopped. The economic system that simultaneously is both liberalism’s handmaiden and its engine, like a Frankenstein monster, takes on a life of its own, and its processes and logic can no longer be controlled by people purportedly enjoying the greatest freedom in history. The wages of freedom are bondage to economic inevitability."
Education:
"The rising generation is indoctrinated to embrace an economic and political system they distinctly fear, filling them with cynicism toward their future and their participation in maintaining an order they cannot avoid but which they neither believe in nor trust. Far from feeling themselves to constitute the most liberated and autonomous generation in history, young adults believe less in their task at hand than Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountainside. They accede in the duties demanded of them by their elders, but without joy or love—only with a keen sense of having no other choice. Their overwhelming response to their lot—expressed in countless comments they have offered to me over the years describing their experience and expectations of their own education—is one of entrapment and “no exit,”"
Science & Technology:
"We are increasingly shaped by technology that promises liberation from limits of place, time, and even identity. The computer in every person’s pocket has been shown to change the structure of our minds, turning us into different creatures, conforming us to the demands and nature of a technology that is supposed to allow expression of our true selves.5 How many of us can sit for an hour reading a book or simply thinking or meditating without an addict’s longing for just a hit of the cell phone, that craving that won’t allow us to think or concentrate or reflect until we’ve had our hit? This same technology that is supposed to connect us more extensively and intimately is making us more lonely, more apart.
"Liberalism’s success today is most visible in the gathering signs of its failure. It has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics, economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities—unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will."
"Thus the insistent demand that we choose between protection of individual liberty and expansion of state activity masks the true relation between the state and market: that they grow constantly and necessarily together. Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism. For all the claims about electoral transformations—for “Hope and Change” or “Making America Great Again”—two facts are naggingly apparent: modern liberalism proceeds by making us both more individualist and more statist. This is not because one party advances individualism without cutting back on statism while the other does the opposite; rather, both move simultaneously in tune with our deepest philosophic premises."
"Claiming to liberate the individual from embedded cultures, traditions, places, and relationships, liberalism has homogenized the world in its image—ironically, often fueled by claims of “multiculturalism” or, today, “diversity.”"
He doesn't advocate political revolution, saying that will result in "disorder and misery." Rather, localized forms of resistance building culture against the anticulture of liberalism is his suggested path forward.
Ch 1: Liberalism
Liberalism fundamentally changed the meaning of "liberty." Pre-liberal thought had long seen liberty as a condition of self-rule both individually and collectively that warded off tyranny. Thus training in self-limitation and virtue was the cornerstone of liberty, thus cultural and political institutions existed reinforcing constraints on dissipation. Liberalism rejected this, reconceiving liberty as basically just the ability to do what you want, without external constraints. The ability to pursue your basest desires.
Liberalism broke with the classical and Christian tradition of political thought in a couple key ways.
It shared antiquity's concern for avoiding tyranny, but it changed the strategy for curbing tyranny by cultivating individual virtue and self-mastery to using the baseness of human attributes: pride, self-interest, greed, etc., pitting different interests and classes against each other to prevent any from gaining too much control. He credits Machiavelli with developing/popularizing this idea.
The old tradition's focus on cultivating virtue and self-limitation relied upon reinforcing social norms and structures throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial life. Liberalism viewed these social structures as sources of oppression and limitation and decided to dismantle the longstanding cultural & religious customs & beliefs with an individualistic rationality. Blindly following social norms was irrational and a source of oppression & unnatural limitation and hindered society from productive industry & prosperity. These norms would be dismantled by the state. Descartes and Hobbes argued against "rule of irrational custom and unexamined tradition—especially religious belief and practice"
"Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability."
"What was new is that the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even personal relationships became dominated by considerations of individual choice based on the calculation of individual self-interest, and without broader consideration of the impact of one’s choices upon the community, one’s obligations to the created order, and ultimately to God." This is the voluntarist conception of choice, and it has been incredibly damaging. As these cultural institutions that exerted influence over people's behavior have dissipated, positive law from the government has had to ever increase to make up the difference.
Additionally, to enlarge "human freedom" restraints of nature must be overcome. Thus liberalism unleashed the ever growing "War on Nature" we have today. The scientific push for ever greater progress is motivated by this desire to defeat nature, that was first wave liberalism (conservatism today). Second wave liberalism (progressivism) took this logic of conquering nature and applied it to human nature itself. 1st wave liberals support all economic/scientific mastery of nature; 2nd wave liberals support all efforts to conquer human nature itself, rejecting the idea that human nature is fixed.
The classical liberal advances individual liberty & opportunity through protection of a free international market while the progressive liberal advances individual liberty through attempts to equalize society economically & socially through the regulatory & judicial powers of the national government. In these complementary ways, the right and left work together advancing both individualism & statism.
"Both “classical” and “progressive” liberalism ground the advance of liberalism in individual liberation from the limitations of place, tradition, culture, and any unchosen relationship. Both traditions—for all their differences over means—can be counted as liberal because of this fundamental commitment to liberation of the individual and to the use of natural science, aided by the state, as a primary means for achieving practical liberation from nature’s limitations."
Classical liberalism's theory is based on a theoretical primitive free and independent state of nature, ungoverned and even without relations to other people, as the "natural" state of man & the regulative ideal the state should attempt to approach—the state where everything that can be willed by an individual can be done. "As Bertrand de Jouvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a philosophy conceived by 'childless men who must have forgotten their own childhood.'" It transforms the economy by force to remove restraints on the individual, the state destroying traditional community practices that do not align with the liberal project of unfettered free trade. Examples: efforts to eradicate the medieval guilds, the enclosure controversy, in state suppression of Luddites,” in state support for owners over organized labor. This actually retrains people to see themselves as isolated individuals, separated from community acting as an abstract utility maximizer in a impersonal global market.
Progressive liberalism says that "only complete liberation from the shackles of unfreedom—including especially the manacles of economic degradation and inequality—can bring the emergence of a new and better individuality." It uses the state to ensure individual's autonomy from any local or societal control in matters of the family, morals, and sexuality.
Totalitarianism rises when people are discontent and lonely. Individualism (the destruction of community, local ties, the family, culture, & religion) and statism go hand in hand.
Ch 3: Liberalism Anticulture
Liberalism has almost completely destroyed local cultures, replacing them with an all-pervasive, homogenous "anticulture."
He says liberal anticulture has 3 pillars: the conquest of nature, fractured timelessness, & homeless rootlessness.
It is also the consequence of using standardized law to replace widely observed informal cultural norms (discarded as a form of oppression) and "a universal and homogenous market, resulting in a monoculture that…colonizes and destroys actual cultures rooted in experience, history, and place."
Since liberalism is based on the harnessing of erstwhile vices, state power is required to overturn cultural institutions responsible for containing such appetites. (The worldview of "greed, for lack of a better word, is good.") "The powers of the liberal state are increasingly focused on dislocating those remaining cultural institutions that were responsible for governance of consumer and sexual appetite—purportedly in the name of freedom and equality, but above all in a comprehensive effort to displace cultural forms as the ground condition of liberal liberty." He says this in his section on liberal attempt to conquer nature, but in many ways it's also a succumbing to sinful nature.
Culture expands our experience of time, making us cognizant of the past & future when otherwise we would be concerned only for the present moment. "To chasten, educate, and moderate this basic instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious, and familial structures, practices, and expectations."
Liberalism simultaneously teaches man not to regard his ancestors and not to concern himself with the future after his death. Culture consists in planting trees that you will never see the shade of.
Liberalism teaches placelessness. Thomas Jefferson claimed "the most fundamental right defining the liberal human is the right to leave the place of one’s birth."
"This placeless default is one of the preeminent ways that liberalism subtly, unobtrusively, and pervasively undermines all cultures and liberates individuals into the irresponsibility of anticulture." We are all homeless, and therefore without community ties or obligations. "Communities maintain standards and patterns of life that encourage responsible and communally sanctioned forms of erotic bonds, with the aim of fostering the strong family ties and commitments that constitute the backbone of communal health and the conduit of culture and tradition. Communities thus chasten the absolutist claims of 'rights bearers': for instance, Berry insists that they are justified in maintaining internally derived standards of decency in order to foster and maintain a desired moral ecology."
Liberalism has hollowed out every social norm and custom in favor of legal codes. In modern society, if one has the legal right to do something, nothing more can be said on the issue.
"elite universities are preeminent examples of what were once institutions of cultural formation that have become purveyors of liberal anticulture." The replacements of collegial cultural standards governing dating with more governmental oversight attempting to limit the damage of unrestrained appetite in a sexual jungle is a perfect example of the change liberalism has wrought on our society.
"Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual, and a major ambition and increasing achievement of liberalism was to reshape a world organized around the human war against nature, a pervasive amnesia about the past and indifference toward the future, and the wholesale disregard for making places worth loving and living in for generations. The replacement of these conditions with a ubiquitous and uniform anticulture is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism and among the greatest threats to our continued common life. The very basis of liberalism’s success again ushers in the conditions for its demise."
Ch 4: Technology
His most clear contrast of what he says was the different between classical and liberal understandings of liberty:
Classical: "Liberty, by this understanding, was not doing as one wished, but was choosing the right and virtuous course. To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent."
Liberal: "The defining feature of modern thought was the rejection of this definition of liberty in favor of the one more familiar to us today. Liberty, as defined by the originators of modern liberalism, was the condition in which humans were completely free to pursue whatever they desired."
He says the constitution is the epitome of a liberal document built on this new understanding of liberty overturning ancient teachings.
Technology shapes us and is simultaneously the source of liberal hope but also a source of existential fear of its "unstoppable progress." He contrasts that relationship to technology with that of the Amish, who ask the basic question, “Will this or won’t it help support the fabric of our community?" when deciding whether to adopt a technology.
"We have choices about what kind of technology we will use—whether a sedan or a jeep, an iPhone or a Galaxy, a Mac or a PC—we largely regard ourselves as subject to the logic of technological development and ultimately not in a position to eschew any particular technology. By contrast, the Amish—who seem to constrain so many choices—exercise choice over the use and adoption of technologies based upon criteria upon which they base their community. Who is free?"
Ch 5: Liberalism against Liberal Arts
"Ultimately [Liberalism] destroys liberal education, since it begins with the assumption that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to become free." The purpose of the liberal arts was to cultivate a free and self-governing person, which liberalism says is not needed.
"Students increasingly feel that they have no choice but to pursue the most practical major, eschewing subjects to which native curiosity might attract them in obeisance to the demands of the market."
Even the Right does not spend time defending the liberal arts anymore, they are more inclined to push STEM degrees reflecting their liberal sensibilities to the modern economy's needs.
The Liberal Arts should be able to mount a defense. "Its warning would be simple, recalling its oldest lessons: at the end of the path of liberation lies enslavement. Such liberation from all obstacles is finally illusory, for two simple reasons: human appetite is insatiable." However, the Liberal Arts has been taken over as well, so in its attempt to remain relevant it spends its time critiquing the classic works instead of learning from them.
Ch 6: The New Aristocracy
Liberalism replaced one ruling class with another. Its thinkers knew this is what their program entailed, John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government (liberalism’s foundational text according to Deneen) split citizens into 2 categories of “industrious and the rational” and “the querulous and contentious.” But they believed that an aristocracy of individual merit rather than lineage, a "natural aristocracy," would be beneficial to and supported by all because the prosperity generated by allowing those with the greatest natural endowments to lead would spread to all. Progressive liberalism eventually reacted against this proposition, saying that the massive inequality (successfully) generated by classical liberalism was now an obstacle to fuller liberty.
"This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility." Classical liberals still laud this as the ideal today. Later "progressive" liberals built on this, acknowledging that it had toppled the old aristocracy but that now large scale societal inequality needed to be dealt with to further liberty. It enlisted the support of the masses by claiming it would correct the injustices of the previous system (titanic inequality), however that is never realized. What is realized is the further weakening of social forms and cultural traditions already devastated by classical liberalism. Progressivism secures "the liberation of those living outside the guidelines and strictures of cultural norms by disassembling the social structures and cultural practices that supported the flourishing of the greater part of humanity." It harms the majority who benefit from cultural customs so that the abnormal who are restricted from what they would otherwise do can be "liberated."
"Progressive liberalism was never actually a foe of classical liberalism. Its true enemy was a kind of lived “Burkeanism”: the way of life of much of humanity."
He brings up John Stuart Mill as exemplifying this progressive argument. Mill argued for society structured for the benefit of the rare geniuses who are otherwise constrained by the limits of custom. He realized this meant the "best" had to dominate the ordinary, even going so far as to acknowledge enslavement of backwards groups of people could be necessary for a time to get them to abandon unproductive leisure and focus on economic productivity.
"Americans, for much of their history, were not philosophically interested in Burke but were Burkeans in practice. Most lived in accordance with custom—with basic moral assumptions concerning the fundamental norms that accompanied a good life. You should respect authority, beginning with your parents. You should display modest and courteous comportment. You should avoid displays of lewdness or titillation. You should engage in sexual activity only when married. Once married, you should stay married. You should have children—generally, lots of them. You should live within your means. You should thank and worship the Lord. You should pay respect to the elderly and remember and acknowledge your debts to the dead. Mill dismissed these behaviors as unthinking custom; Burke praised them as essential forms of 'prejudice.'"
Burke: "In this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, [and] that, instead of throwing away our old prejudices, we cherish them. . . . We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock of each man is small, and that the individuals do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. . . . Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature."
"A society can be shaped for the benefit of most people by emphasizing mainly informal norms and customs that secure the path to flourishing for most human beings; or it can be shaped for the benefit of the extraordinary and powerful by liberating all from the constraint of custom. Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary; today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong."
The result of this new liberalism is now visible. Our new social classes have become significantly static, though there remains the possibility that anyone can move up the social ladder (usually by entrance into an elite college), the gap between the haves and the have not grows, and the bottom rung of American society is wrecked by the cultural gutting out enforced by the state at the impetus of the powerful.
The aristocracy in many ways don't actually exhibit the negative traits they have encouraged the proliferation of in the lower classes. "The wealthy and powerful today enjoy family and marital stability, relatively low rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth, and low incidences of drugs and criminality," while on all these measures the lower classes are in abysmal shape. The aristocracy believe their own lie that they are working for the good of the people while actually benefitting from institutions that ensure their continued status at the top.
Ch 7:
There is a bipolarism in liberal democracy. They sometimes laud democracy and have pushed for more direct democracy in things like referendums, but when electorates reject some doctrine of liberalism liberals are quick to return to the mistrust of the "backwards" masses & the use of the other features of liberalism like the courts to restrict the people's ability to achieve anything non-liberal.
"The dominant American political narrative—consistent from the time of the Founding to the Progressive Era and even to the present day—was simultaneously one that valorized democratic governance while devising structures that insulated government from excessive popular influence."
The founders' plan to deal with the ancient problem of factions was not to commend public spiritedness, but to sow distrust amongst the citizenry to discourage the forming of alliances.
The Federalist's authors acknowledged that men's natural affections are for those closest to them, but "we see that Publius clearly believes and intends that better administration at the federal level will lead to the displacement of local loyalties and engagement, and the redirection of attachments to the central government."
"To be a democratic citizen entitled one to the expansion of individual ambitions and experiences, and one’s civic duty was fulfilled by supporting a government that constantly advanced forms of expressive individualism. “Progressives” thus have had little success reining in the expansion of the private realm devoted to increasing acquisition of property and economic power. “Conservatives” have likewise had little success thwarting the expansion of individual expressivism, especially thwarting the advance of the sexual revolution. If anyone wants to know why the Republicans have failed to make the federal government smaller and to devolve power back to the states in significant ways (as they have claimed they seek to do at least since Goldwater, if not since FDR), we should recognize that such a reversal would go against the logic and the grain of the regime. It was designed so that power would accumulate at the center."
Conclusion:
"Today we consider the paramount sign of the liberation of women to be their growing emancipation from their biology, which frees them to serve a different, disembodied body—“corporate” America—and participate in an economic order that effectively obviates any actual political liberty. Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount to liberation, but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage."
"Liberalism takes the fundamental position that “consent” to any relationship or bond can be given only when people are completely and perfectly autonomous and individual." Decisions made where your values are influenced by your community's standards are seen as illegitimate, but this is false.
The book is light on proposals for the path forward. Basically calling for focusing on building local communities where you are and saying we need a new post-liberal ideology to come.
