The Niskanen Center publishes rigorous center-right libertarian opinion. For capitalist apologetics of the most grounded and candid sort, there’s the Financial Times. The flagship publication of Catholic conservatism, First Things, is often worth a read. Even Patrick Buchanan’s the American Conservative, for all its racist and misogynistic baggage, occasionally provides a forum for less bigoted and more thoughtful opinion on the Right. [...]
Deneen argues that liberalism’s breakdown can be explained not by its failure but by its success. As modernity’s presiding ideology has become fully realized, he writes, its contradictions have become more apparent. Liberal commitments to fairness, pluralism, and autonomy have yielded a world of vast inequity, conformity, and coercion — and these injustices have been the product of the very worldview designed to overcome them. [...]
In Deneen’s telling, both the modern right and left are comprised of conservative liberals and progressive liberals. The former remains loyal to the proto-liberal revolution of English philosophers like Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, where human nature is fixed but non-human nature is malleable and liable to conquest. The latter endorses the more ardent liberal revolutions of everyone from Jean Jacques-Rousseau to John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx, where human and non-human natures are meant to be molded and conquered. [...]
And finally, there is the assurance that the author is in no way calling for the reversal of basic modern achievements — slavery, exclusive male suffrage, or feudalism shall safely remain regrets of the past. The fact that the sixth assertion vitiates the five that preceded it speaks to the fragility on which the entire anti-modern position rests. [...]
If the argument’s long history doesn’t quite work, neither does its short one. Deneen wants to make the case that as liberalism spurns traditional norms, individuals become progressively unruly while the state grows ever more overbearing. Society becomes marred by crime, mass incarceration, corruption, social distrust, rapaciousness, inequality, illness, and authoritarian governance. Cultural liberalism and moral laxness, that is, travel in tow.
No comments:
Post a Comment