Regime change begins at home, and we need it. Our nation has been run into the ground, and our leaders seems at best clueless about, and at worst complicit in, the destruction. But replacing an elite caste is difficult; elites are, well, elite in power and connections, even if not in competence.
Notre Dame political theory professor Patrick Deneen has some ideas about why our elites are so bad, and what to do about it. A half-decade after his successful book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen is ready to answer the question, “What now?” with Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. He deserves credit for attempting to build and not just critique, and this volume is an insightful, challenging, and sometimes perplexing sketch of what has gone wrong in our nation, and what might be done to put it right.
The book’s diagnosis begins with a critique of liberalism that emphasizes how the persistent divide between the few and the many is exacerbated by liberalism, which suppresses the views of the many in the name of progress. Some sort of elite is inevitable, but liberalism encourages an elite that is antithetical to the many.
Deneen argues that an ideological commitment to progress will always be directed against the people, who naturally tend to be conservative. What the people need and want “is stability, order, continuity and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future,” which is to say, a “conservatism that conserves.” What liberalism offers in its
