Regime Change Is Built In To Liberalism
Deneen's critiques are incisive and also capable of being absorbed
The United States of America is a very strange country, one that makes ‘conservatism’ a practical impossibility. By ‘conservatism’ I mean ‘deference towards social structures that have organically evolved over vast swaths of time’, social structures that include everything to families to churches to aristocracies and monarchies. Europe has conservative possibilities in this respect, with its cathedrals and palaces and people who have raised families in more or less the same spot for as long as anyone can remember. America, though, was founded by immigrants as a ‘liberal’ nation, one that valorizes individual liberty and free markets and the separation of church and state, and after its founding proceeded to displace and destroy the humans who had been here for centuries. America has no ‘organic’, conservative past to which it can appeal or return.
Without a hereditary aristocracy, the nature and character of the American ‘elite’ is up for grabs. By ‘elite’ I mean ‘the people with outsize power and influence whose decisions shape the lives of others’, the people who run institutions from governments to corporations to universities. This book takes aim at this ‘elite’ and argues two things: that ‘liberalism’ has generated corrupt elites who are hostile to the common people, and that a new elite is necessary that self-consciously aligns itself with the common good of the people they lead.
According to the book, the defining feature of ‘liberalism’ is a valorization of change and progress for its own sake, with enlightened elites imposing their vision of progress on resentful commoners who are held in contempt for their retrograde views. This elite-driven imposition of ‘progress’ unites three disparate political tendencies which superficially seem to be in opposition - free market libertarians, social-justice progressives, and Marxist-socialists.
Free market libertarianism features a vision of ‘meritocracy’, where the elite is composed of those who have displayed a high degree of technical competence and talent. The ‘commoners’, then, are people who have NOT displayed enough excellence to escape their lowly positions. The elites hire and fire people and raise and lower prices and generally throw the commoners’ lives into chaos all for the sake of making more money. Maybe there’s a bit of Christian piety thrown in for spice, flattering the elite as being favored by God and disciplining the commoners by orienting them towards hard work and away rom theft, but the highest good is the bottom line. If you fail and suffer it’s because you’re just too stupid to think ahead.
Social-justice progressivism sees the common people as soaked in prejudice and half-conscious villainy, from racism to sexism to homophobia to transphobia, and that it is the job of an enlightened elite to disrupt and destroy the lives of commoners in order to disrupt and destroy these prejudices. This elite is to be comprised of the ‘historically marginalized’, people whose skillsets center around identifying ‘historical marginalization’ and asserting that they are themselves members of these impacted groups. The elite are the righteous victims and the commoners are the real oppressors. Insufficient deference to the elite is a contemptible expression of privilege and cruelty and does real harm to ‘marginalized communities’ and is cause for punishment.
Marxist-socialists also see the common people as soaked in prejudice, but of a self-oppressing kind. Faith, family, and free markets are all false idols that keep ‘the people’ from rising up and reclaiming the surplus value that the capitalist class has stolen from their labor. The Marxist-socialist elite is one that is fully dedicated to raising class-consciousness and fomenting revolutionary activity, and who after the revolution will set about enforcing equality and destroying recidivism. Marx predicted that socialist revolutions would organically and spontaneously arise from sufficiently-advanced capitalist societies, which didn’t happen - instead, Lenin declared that the common people could never progress beyond a ‘trade-union consciousness’ and led a power grab in backwards agrarian Russia and founded a totalitarian police state.
So: libertarianism, progressivism, and socialism are all united by a worship of progress and a contempt for tradition, a worship of theories and a contempt for the non-theoretical common people. What makes the worship of progress bad is that tradition is a profoundly valuable source of wisdom. Tradition is a stockpile of information that has endured countless generations, an accumulation of truth that no individual could ever discover themselves nor could ever fully articulate. Honor for tradition, surprisingly, is what permits progress to happen at all! Respect for tradition means that each generation gets to learn from every generation that preceded it, rather having to figure out being human from scratch. A worship of progress for its own sake means an unthinking severance from the past, a severance that leaves us flailing around in the void of the present, paradoxically unable to really build a future at all.
As such: what the author recommends is a new elite, one that self-consciously turns against the extractive and destructive elites of modernity. This new elite will be charged with protecting and preserving the cultural heritage of the common people, a heritage developed and preserved over countless generations, a heritage that requires an active defense against the corrosive effects of liberal modernity. This heritage must be actively defended against the disruptive, extractive anonymity of the market, and it must be actively defended against the juvenile entitlement of those who see justice as the abolition of all outward authority and inward self-control.
Deneen's critique of liberal elites is incisive and insightful but ultimately incomplete. While he correctly identifies the destructive potential of unfettered markets and emancipatory movements divorced from deeper moral purposes, he fails to recognize how liberalism's core features – its self-consciousness, its capacity for self-criticism, and its ability to synthesize competing values – might actually serve the common good he seeks to protect.
For starters, read this book on a digital device in a clean and air-conditioned room of my own free will - the only barrier to me reading it was paying for access to it. I am much happier with that encounter than the one I would have had as a medieval peasant, illiterate and covered in mud, the Bible being the only book accessible and even that only by priestly permission. I am grateful that I am free to read books and make up my own mind about things and to consider the value of what people have to say without having to secure the consent of a censor. I am also grateful that I got to read this book thanks to the technological innovations and material prosperity that market economies have brought about. Yes, markets can be disruptive and extractive, but they have also produced unprecedented abundance and progress that has *actually improved the lives of countless people*. Progress isn’t a vacant fetish or corrupt collapse, it’s a real thing that has happened. The challenge is not to abolish markets but to embed them within moral frameworks that direct their creative energies toward genuine human flourishing. Liberal societies have repeatedly shown themselves capable of this kind of market regulation and reform, from antitrust legislation to environmental protections to labor rights.
Similarly, while progressive movements can sometimes descend into performative virtue-signaling or destructive iconoclasm, they have also expanded human dignity and unlocked human potential in vital ways. The civil rights movement, women's suffrage, gay rights – these movements have enabled millions to participate more fully in society, enriching our common life rather than diminishing it. This progress has brought about new problems to solve, but that’s the nature of progress!
This points to a deeper problem with Deneen's argument: his romanticization of pre-liberal traditional societies. While these societies certainly contained wisdom worth preserving, they also perpetuated terrible injustices and unnecessary suffering. Hereditary aristocracies often proved just as extractive and contemptuous of common people as any modern elite. Religious authorities frequently suppressed scientific and moral progress. The past Deneen yearns for was itself built on exploitation and exclusion, every bit as filled with corruption and error as we are today.
This is especially relevant for America which has no ancient organic traditions to return to. Our national story begins with experimentation and reinvention. But rather than seeing this as a weakness, we might recognize it as a unique strength - indeed, as an intergenerational project we can be proud of. America's founding ideals – however imperfectly realized – created a framework for ongoing moral and political development. Our capacity for self-criticism and reform, our ability to expand the circle of full citizenship and dignity, our synthesis of individual liberty with common purpose – these are themselves worthy traditions that can provide the moral continuity Deneen seeks.
Liberalism's greatest strength may be precisely what its conservative critics see as its fatal flaw: its self-consciousness as an ideology. Unlike pre-modern traditional societies, liberalism knows itself to be a chosen system of beliefs and practices rather than simply "the way things are." This self-awareness enables liberalism to examine its own assumptions, acknowledge its shortcomings, and work to correct them. It can incorporate valid critiques – including many of Deneen's – while maintaining its core commitment to human dignity and reasoned discourse.
A reformed liberalism must therefore take seriously the wisdom embedded in traditional forms of human association, resisting the drift into atomization and isolation. The extended family, the neighborhood, the congregation, the civic club – these are vital spaces where people learn to balance individual drives with reciprocal obligation, where they develop the habits of character necessary for democratic citizenship. While we needn't (and couldn't) return to some imagined pre-liberal golden age, we can learn from how traditional communities cultivated the networks of trust and reciprocity that make collective life possible. We can do so in a way that is as conscious of the past’s limits as we are of our own today.
This means developing policies and institutions that actively support community formation rather than just assuming that civil society will spontaneously emerge from optimized individual choices. It might mean privileging local businesses over chain stores, designing neighborhoods around walking and gathering rather than driving and shopping, and protecting time for communal ritual and celebration from the endless expansion of the workweek. It means recognizing that markets serve communities, not the other way around. It also means developing individual habits that orient ourselves in these critical directions.
The path forward, then, is not to abandon liberalism but to reform it – to preserve its genuine achievements while working to address its excesses and blind spots. This might mean developing new institutions and practices that better connect elite expertise with common wisdom. It might mean finding ways to harness market dynamism while protecting community stability. It might mean pursuing social justice through evolution rather than revolution. This is the unique genius of the American experiment: not a return to an imagined past, but an ongoing project of self-development guided by both enduring principles and contemporary insights. Our task is not to choose between tradition and progress but to thoughtfully integrate them, creating a society that honors both human dignity and human bonds, both individual flourishing and common good.
In this light, Deneen's call for a new elite dedicated to preserving cultural heritage might be better reframed as a call for leadership that can bridge divides: between expertise and experience, between innovation and stability, between individual rights and communal obligations. Such leadership would neither worship progress blindly nor tradition uncritically, but would work to harmonize them in service of genuine human flourishing.