Regime Change, de Patrick J. Deneen — Resumo
Sinopse
Deneen’s central thesis is that liberalism was not betrayed by bad leaders or disrupted by external crises — it produced the conditions of its own failure. By replacing freedom-as-self-discipline with freedom-as-emancipation-from-all-bonds, liberalism destroyed the institutions that sustained common life and generated a new ruling class that presents itself as meritocratic but functions as oligarchy. The defining political conflict of the present is not left vs. right but the few against the many; and the way out is not internal liberal reform but a regime change that reorients the political order toward the common good through a mixed constitution — what Deneen calls “aristopopulism.”
The argument is built in two movements: diagnosis and program. In the diagnosis (Chapters 1–4), Deneen uses intellectual history (Locke, Mill, Marx, Burke, Tocqueville), political sociology (Burnham on the managerial revolution, Sandel on meritocracy), and empirical cases (the COVID pandemic, the Indiana RFRA controversy, the 2020 electoral map) to show that classical liberalism, progressivism, and Marxism are variants of the same modern project of transformation — each elitist in its own way. In the program (Chapters 5–7), Deneen recovers Aristotle, Polybius, Aquinas, and Machiavelli to propose a mixed constitution blending the wisdom of the many with the discipline of the few; critiques meritocracy as a resentment machine; and proposes integration — of classes, of time (memory vs. progress), of races, of scales of belonging — as an alternative to the liberal logic of separations.
For the vault, the book is an obligatory reference for at least three reasons. First, Deneen’s analysis of meritocratic elitism — which converts inequality into moral verdict — is the most articulate formulation of the wounded thymos that produces contemporary populism: the anger is not just economic, it is about recognition. Second, the concept of aristopopulism offers a language for the realignment the vault tracks in Brazil: the fusion of labor demands and social conservatism that appears in public opinion data. Third, Deneen’s critique of liberalism as an “organization of separations” — economic, cultural, temporal, class-based — is a direct counterpoint to the liberal-democratic theses of Fukuyama, Wolf, and Gopnik already recorded in the vault, and helps define the terms of the debate Pedro is developing in the Nova República book.
Introduction — O Fim do Liberalismo como Problema de Regime
The introduction opens with a stark diagnosis of the United States as a society that is visibly failing to flourish. Patrick J. Deneen presents a landscape marked by widening economic inequality, collapsing family formation, physical decay in cities and towns, falling birthrates, deaths of despair, addiction, distraction, and a younger generation burdened by debt created by its elders. These are not treated as isolated problems but as symptoms of a deeper civilizational and political exhaustion. The country, in his account, is not merely undergoing a difficult phase; it is living through the breakdown of the governing logic that has structured modern liberal society.
From that social diagnosis, Deneen moves to the political consequences. He argues that contemporary America is increasingly haunted by two opposite but related dangers: oligarchy and mob rule. Public debate, he says, now openly entertains the possibility of civil conflict and even the desirability of coercive domination by one side over the other. For him, this is the telltale sign of a regime that has lost its ability to secure legitimacy and maintain civic peace. The more elites flirt with authoritarian control, the more populist fury intensifies; the more social conflict escalates, the more tyranny becomes thinkable as a solution. The introduction therefore frames the present not as routine polarization but as a regime crisis.
Deneen situates that crisis within a very old problem in political philosophy: the conflict between “the few” and “the many.” In the classical tradition, he argues, thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Polybius, Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Tocqueville understood that this division could never be fully abolished. The best political order was therefore not one that imagined the disappearance of conflict, but one that mixed social forces in a stable constitutional arrangement. This “mixed regime” or “mixed constitution” sought to balance elite capacity and popular power in a way that preserved continuity, prevented domination by any one class, and oriented politics toward the common good. For Deneen, the classical ambition was equilibrium rather than permanent transformation.
Modern liberalism, in his telling, broke with that older wisdom by convincing itself that progress could solve what earlier thinkers regarded as a permanent political fact. Classical liberalism put its faith in economic dynamism: freer markets, expanding commerce, and the disruptive power of capitalism would allegedly generate enough prosperity to reconcile the classes over time. Liberal society therefore ceased to aim at balance and began to glorify motion, innovation, and what Deneen presents as a permanent condition of instability. The losses imposed by market society were justified by the promise that growth would compensate everyone in the long run. He treats this as liberalism’s first great wager: that economic progress would pacify political antagonism.
Progressive liberalism, according to Deneen, rejected the inequalities produced by laissez-faire economics without abandoning the deeper liberal faith in progress itself. Instead of trusting primarily in markets, it increasingly invested in social transformation. In his account, this meant loosening inherited norms, displacing traditional moral structures, and attempting to liberate individuals from the constraints of custom, family, religion, and even nature. He sees the sexual revolution as the culmination of this trajectory. Where classical liberals sought reconciliation through economic growth, progressive liberals sought it through cultural emancipation. Yet both remained committed to the same basic premise: that history moves forward through progress and that political peace will emerge once inherited barriers and attachments are overcome.
A central claim of the introduction is that these two versions of liberalism are less true adversaries than partners within a single regime. Although they fight over methods, Deneen argues that both sides distrust the demos and both seek to prevent the emergence of a genuine people’s politics that would challenge liberalism on both economic and social grounds. The post–Cold War order is described as an arrangement in which market libertarianism and cultural libertarianism alternated and then fused, producing an elite consensus that advanced both economic globalization and social progressivism. What matters most in this argument is not partisan difference but a common ruling-class commitment to progress and a shared suspicion that ordinary people are obstacles to it.
Deneen then presents contemporary populism as the backlash produced by that consensus. He argues that large parts of the public have turned against both neoliberal economics and progressive social ideology at the same time. In economic terms, he describes demands for protection of national industries, stronger worker safeguards, resistance to monopoly power, and a more substantial social safety net. In social terms, he portrays the backlash as resistance to the desacralization of family, religion, and communal norms. His key point is that the political energy rising across the West cannot be understood through the old left-right map. It is, in his interpretation, the reappearance of the conflict between the many and the few beneath the fading vocabulary of liberal democracy.
Because liberalism now intensifies the division it once promised to heal, Deneen argues that a genuinely postliberal alternative becomes both necessary and possible. He proposes a conservatism centered not on abstract individual autonomy or market freedom, but on stability, continuity, duty, mutual obligation, and gratitude across generations. Liberty, in this framework, is not the liberation of the self from limits; it is the freedom to live well within institutions that sustain shared life. Family, church, community, and nation matter because they cultivate solidarity and orient people toward a good that is held in common rather than possessed privately. The regime change he has in mind is therefore not necessarily a formal replacement of institutions, but a replacement of the social ethos and ruling purpose that animate them.
The political vehicle for this project, he suggests, is what he calls a postliberal “new right,” though he immediately notes that the label is imperfect. Economically, this tendency is willing to adopt positions once associated with the social-democratic left, especially when they serve workers, families, and national cohesion. Socially, it is unapologetically conservative, insisting that equality without moral and institutional order is self-defeating. Deneen presents this not as an innovation ex nihilo but as a recovery of an older conservative tradition, one that reaches back through early modern critics of progress to the ancient doctrine of the mixed constitution. He names the synthesis “common-good conservatism.”
The introduction closes by turning from diagnosis to strategy. Deneen insists that the ruling elite will not abandon its project voluntarily, but he also rejects the fantasy of a purely spontaneous mass uprising. What is required, in his view, is an alliance between the many and a minority of elite defectors—people capable of interpreting popular grievances, building institutions, and redirecting political power toward the common good. In that sense, the book announces itself not merely as a lament over liberalism’s failures but as a programmatic argument: liberalism has exhausted itself, the old constitutional question has returned, and a new governing class must be formed or reformed to build a postliberal order.
Chapter 1 — The End of Liberalism
Chapter 1 opens with the book’s core provocation: liberalism did not simply encounter an external crisis or suffer from a few bad leaders; it generated the conditions of its own failure. The author argues that liberalism began as a revolt against hereditary hierarchy, promising a world in which birth would no longer determine station and in which talent and effort would replace inherited rank. Yet the result, several centuries later, is not a genuinely classless order but the rise of a new ruling stratum that presents itself as meritocratic while functioning, in practice, as a new aristocracy. The chapter’s first move is therefore to reframe the present conflict in the West. The defining political split is no longer between left and right in the older sense, but between elites and ordinary people, between those who flourish within liberalism’s institutional order and those who experience that order as humiliation, dislocation, and contempt.
To explain how this happened, the chapter contrasts two understandings of liberty. In the premodern tradition, liberty meant self-rule: the disciplined capacity to govern one’s appetites, to live within moral limits, and to participate in a shared ethical and political order. Freedom, on this older view, required formation. Families, churches, schools, civic associations, customs, and inherited practices all served as “guardrails” that taught restraint and made liberty possible. Liberalism, by contrast, redefined freedom as emancipation from constraints associated with birth, place, tradition, and inherited obligation. This shift was not merely political. It required the gradual weakening of the institutions that had cultivated self-command, because those institutions now appeared as oppressive barriers to autonomy and self-creation.
The chapter insists that liberalism’s story about this transformation is a self-congratulatory myth of progress. According to that story, the weakening of older institutions liberated human beings from superstition, hierarchy, and exclusion, opening the path to justice and equality. The author treats this as a classic form of Whig history: a flattering account told by the winners about why their victory was inevitable and good. He argues that this narrative suppresses the social cost of dismantling inherited forms of life. The very institutions liberalism condemned as repressive often also performed indispensable democratic work. They shaped ordinary people, restrained the ambitious, preserved memory, and gave communities a degree of moral coherence that law alone could never supply.
John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville function in the chapter as opposing symbols of these two outlooks. Mill is presented as the theorist of liberation from custom, the thinker who saw ambient culture and inherited moral expectation as threats to individuality and experimentation. Tocqueville, by contrast, is recruited as the great analyst of the democratic necessity of social restraint. Tocqueville understood that religion, custom, and majority mores could limit revolutionary temperaments and prevent social life from dissolving into permanent upheaval. The chapter uses this contrast to argue that what liberals dismissed as conformist pressure could also be understood as a democratic inheritance: the accumulated wisdom of ordinary people, what the author calls, in effect, the rule of the living under the tutelage of the dead.
From there the chapter turns to elite formation under liberalism. Contemporary elites are trained not simply by mastering knowledge but by learning how to operate in a world where inherited moral structure has been disassembled. They internalize two lessons above all: first, that traditional forms should be redescribed as oppressive systems in need of dismantling; and second, that success belongs to those who can navigate the resulting fluidity with ease. Elite education therefore creates a class that publicly denounces old moral “guardrails” while privately reproducing a new, highly selective code of belonging. This is where credentialism enters the chapter’s argument. Degrees, institutional prestige, and cultural fluency become the new markers of worth. Those who rise within this system experience their success as deserved; those who do not are treated as personally responsible for their own marginalization.
The middle section of the chapter surveys the contemporary political literature around populism and elite rule. On one side are books and arguments denouncing a smug, hostile elite that has broken faith with ordinary people. On the other are denunciations of “the people” as resentful, backward, racist, authoritarian, or incapable of adapting to modernity. The author’s point is not that one side is simply right and the other wrong. It is that both camps increasingly define themselves in negative, oppositional terms. Each side builds its own self-image through hatred of the other. Conservative populists flatter themselves by imagining that all corruption resides in elite circles; elite defenders flatter themselves by imagining that their own decency is proven by the backwardness of the masses.
The chapter then makes a sharper and more uncomfortable claim: both classes now display real moral failures. The ruling class is condescending, disconnected, and insulated from the consequences of the social order it administers. But the working and middle classes, having been weakened by the destruction of the institutions that once cultivated solidarity and responsibility, often answer contempt with resentment, vulgarity, and support for demagogues. In other words, the current cold civil war is not a contest between virtue and vice. It is a struggle in which each side increasingly becomes the worst version of itself, precisely because neither any longer exists within structures designed to correct its defects. Liberalism has not elevated one class and merely oppressed another; it has degraded the political character of both.
To recover a better framework, the chapter reaches back to the older tradition of the mixed constitution. In that tradition, societies were understood as containing different classes with distinct temptations and distinct excellences. Elites, when healthy, could cultivate prudence, refinement, generosity, and long-range judgment; common people, when healthy, could cultivate realism, frugality, practical wisdom, endurance, and a sense for the rhythms of ordinary life. But each class also carried characteristic vices. The political problem was never how to eliminate one class for the sake of the other. It was how to arrange social life so that each checked, corrected, and even improved the other. The chapter emphasizes that this richer notion of “mixing” goes far beyond the thin procedural idea of checks and balances familiar in modern constitutionalism.
The chapter closes by arguing that modern politics abandoned this older aspiration in favor of projects of unilateral triumph. Liberalism treated “the people” as obstacles to progress and sought to discipline democracy; Marxist and populist responses, by contrast, often imagined the elites as the class to be overthrown or eliminated. The result in both cases is a politics oriented toward defeat rather than mutual improvement. That, for the author, is the deepest mark of liberalism’s exhaustion. It no longer possesses a social philosophy capable of reconciling classes or cultivating shared ends. And because the ruling class possesses the greater concentration of power, wealth, and institutional leverage, the chapter ends by assigning it the greater burden of blame. The next chapter, accordingly, turns to the character of this new elite in order to show why it is especially incapable of reforming itself.
Chapter 2 — The Power Elite
Chapter 2 defines the contemporary ruling class more precisely and argues that it is historically novel. The author begins by identifying four distinctive traits. First, this elite is managerial: its authority rests less on land, lineage, or even direct ownership than on technical, organizational, financial, and symbolic skills. Second, it publicly rejects hereditary hierarchy while quietly reproducing its own status across generations. Third, it uses the language of identity, injury, and victimhood as an instrument of power rather than as a challenge to power. Fourth, it governs increasingly through private and semiprivate institutions—universities, corporations, media organizations, foundations, and bureaucracies—rather than through overt democratic rule. This combination makes the modern elite harder to identify and harder to hold accountable than older ruling classes.
The chapter’s conceptual backbone is James Burnham’s idea of the managerial revolution. Burnham had predicted that modern societies would be dominated by those who manage systems rather than those who simply own productive assets. The author adopts that framework and argues that our elite is defined by its mastery of abstraction: data, models, logistics, finance, policy, administration, communication, branding, and expertise. In a world where production is increasingly separated from place, labor, and tangible goods, status belongs to people who can manipulate symbols and steer institutions. Wealth may accompany this position, but it is not the essence of it. The essence is social power conferred by credentials and by the ability to navigate institutions designed around complexity, mobility, and constant adaptation.
One of the chapter’s most important arguments is that this class reproduces itself while pretending not to be a class at all. Because it rose in rebellion against inherited aristocracy, it continues to speak in egalitarian language. Yet its members intermarry, concentrate in elite schools and neighborhoods, pass on cultural advantages to their children, and maintain a tight monopoly on access to high-status careers. Inheritance has not disappeared; it has changed form. What is transmitted is less title than social capital, educational fluency, institutional access, and a repertoire of behaviors recognized by gatekeepers. The chapter treats this as a peculiar kind of self-deception. The new elite condemns older hierarchies because they were overt, but it cannot acknowledge the ways in which its own hierarchy has become nearly as closed while remaining morally self-satisfied.
To sharpen the contrast, the author compares the managerial elite with both the old aristocracy and the industrial oligarchs who followed it. He does not deny the injustices of those earlier elites, but he insists that they were tied more visibly to place, continuity, and obligation. Aristocracies, for all their rigidity, often understood themselves as custodians of a particular people and territory across generations. Industrial magnates, however exploitative, at least operated within material economies that could generate stable towns, labor institutions, and party formations capable of bargaining with them. The managerial elite differs because it is strikingly placeless, present-focused, and detached from reciprocal obligation. It extracts talent from local communities, pulls it into metropolitan hubs, and treats every place as interchangeable raw material in a larger system of circulation.
Placelessness, indeed, is presented as one of the ruling class’s defining virtues in its own eyes and one of its gravest defects in the author’s. The modern meritocracy prizes mobility: the ability to leave home, transcend local attachments, adapt to any setting, and treat rootedness as a limitation rather than an achievement. The past likewise becomes disposable, because inherited culture, memory, and custom impede the frictionless movement of talent, capital, and desire. The chapter argues that this social order systematically drains communities of their most ambitious members and then congratulates itself for rewarding excellence. In the process it breaks the bond between achievement and responsibility. The best no longer rise within a shared world to govern it; they leave that world behind and govern from institutions largely insulated from those who remain.
This detachment, the chapter argues, explains why the power elite shows so little serious curiosity about the working class. Official rhetoric is full of inclusion, fairness, and concern for the marginalized, but the category of class is often displaced by softer moral languages that demand emotional sympathy without requiring structural solidarity. The elite’s egalitarianism is therefore selective. It can be passionately exercised over status recognition while ignoring the material and institutional forms through which hierarchy is actually reproduced. The chapter’s discussion of elite campuses is meant to dramatize this contradiction. Institutions that loudly denounce privilege continue to function as extraordinarily powerful sorting machines. They condemn exclusion in theory while organizing social and professional life around intensely exclusionary practices.
That contradiction becomes even clearer in the chapter’s treatment of identity politics. The author argues that the contemporary elite has converted the language of injury into a means of domination. Elite students and professionals, many of whom come from the most advantaged strata in society, present themselves as vulnerable victims in need of protection from speech, ideas, and arguments deemed harmful. The Middlebury protest against Charles Murray serves as a representative episode. What matters in the example is not a defense of Murray’s arguments as such, but the spectacle of highly credentialed future elites suppressing a speaker while claiming the moral authority of the oppressed. In this account, the old political asymmetry has been rhetorically inverted: the powerful portray themselves as threatened, and the socially weaker are recoded as dangerous oppressors.
The chapter links this development to a deeper transformation in education and moral philosophy. Older liberal education, in the classical sense, was meant to form free persons capable of self-government through the study of justice, truth, virtue, philosophy, and theology. Contemporary elite education, by contrast, is said to cultivate flexibility, technique, and status maintenance. Here the author returns to John Stuart Mill. Mill’s harm principle, originally framed as a limit on coercion, becomes in the chapter’s telling the moral grammar through which new forms of coercion are justified. Once “harm” is expansively defined to include offense, discomfort, dissent, or failure to affirm another’s self-definition, institutions gain a powerful rationale for regulating speech and conduct. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, and mandatory affirmations are therefore read not as minor campus fashions but as the ethical training of a class that will later administer society.
The final movement of the chapter shows where that training leads: into a diffuse but formidable regime of corporate, bureaucratic, and cultural power. The author argues that contemporary domination works less through formal government and more through alliances among business, media, universities, and administrative institutions. The Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act controversy, along with the destruction of a small business like Memories Pizza under national pressure, is used to illustrate how this works. Major corporations, national media, and progressive political actors combine to impose a moral settlement that local democratic decisions are not permitted to resist. In that sense, “woke capitalism” is not a contradiction for the author but a culmination: economic liberalism and expressive-progressive liberalism fuse into a single social force that advances market dynamism, cultural deracination, and the delegitimation of traditional norms all at once.
Chapter 2 ends by naming the regime that emerges from this fusion as a new kind of tyranny. It is neither the naked despotism of old oligarchies nor merely the soft paternalism Tocqueville feared from the administrative state. It is a power structure that demands celebration of radical self-expression while using immense institutional leverage to punish resistance. The groups most likely to resist it are those still tied to embodied work, stable communities, inherited homes, and thick moral worlds—in other words, the working and lower-middle strata most exposed to the costs of liberal progress. Yet the author does not call for the annihilation of elites. His conclusion is that the country needs better elites and a different settlement between rulers and ruled. That claim prepares the turn in the next part of the book, where he begins to outline the common-good conservatism meant to replace the exhausted liberal order.
Chapter 3 — A Good That Is Common
Deneen opens the chapter by arguing that modern conservatism often appears incoherent because it has usually defined itself only in reaction to whatever liberalism is doing at a given moment. What counts as “conservative” therefore keeps shifting. A movement that once defended public religious expression, restrictions on obscenity, and thicker moral norms can later become a movement that celebrates private “religious liberty,” maximal free speech, and market dynamism. For Deneen, this instability is not an accidental weakness. It reveals that what passes for conservatism in the contemporary United States has mostly been a relative position inside liberalism, not a genuinely independent political philosophy. The label has therefore come to describe a slowing mechanism for liberal change, not a substantive defense of a different social order.
He then argues that postwar American conservatism became deeply fused with classical liberal premises. In the Cold War, conservatives defined themselves against socialism, communism, and progressive liberalism, but in doing so they adopted liberal assumptions about property, individual rights, markets, and national mission. This political synthesis clothed itself in patriotism and American exceptionalism, yet it did not truly conserve inherited forms of life. Even when it claimed to defend family, religion, and community, it also defended the free-market forces and forms of mobility that steadily eroded those institutions. Deneen’s point is blunt: the right in the United States has often defended the very economic and moral order that destabilizes the social goods it says it cherishes.
From there, the chapter broadens into a larger conceptual map. Deneen proposes that the three main modern political traditions—classical liberalism, progressive liberalism, and Marxism—are all variations of a single modern commitment to progress. Their real disagreements concern means, agents, and institutional forms, not ultimate ends. All three assume that politics should transform the world and overcome inherited limits. They differ mainly over whether progress is best driven by elites or by the people, and whether the people are fundamentally a threat to transformation or its engine. Seen from outside the modern frame, Deneen argues, these rival ideologies look less like true alternatives than like competing branches of the same civilizational project.
In his treatment of classical liberalism, Deneen insists that it was never an egalitarian doctrine in any serious sense. Its real task was to replace an old hereditary elite with a new elite justified by productivity, talent, and acquisition. Locke becomes the central figure here: the theorist of property, industriousness, and self-ownership who helps legitimate a dynamic social order where the “industrious and rational” can accumulate power and wealth. This order requires mobility, weak attachment to inherited obligations, and a society increasingly organized around autonomous individuals rather than families, communities, churches, or fixed ranks. Classical liberalism therefore does not merely protect liberty. It builds a regime in which a new ruling class can emerge and be insulated from popular resentment.
Deneen next turns to the way this classical liberal project was mislabeled as “conservative” in twentieth-century America. He argues that many prominent conservative intellectuals were actually defenders of a revolutionary economic order that prized innovation, disruption, and global market expansion. Their quarrel with the left was not over whether society should be transformed, but over which liberties and which agents should guide that transformation. For that reason, he sees the recent split between populist voters and establishment conservatives as revealing rather than surprising. Once working- and middle-class voters experienced the social costs of deindustrialization, globalization, and permanent economic upheaval, their alliance with market liberalism began to break down. The so-called conservative movement, in his telling, was exposed as a liberal project that had temporarily borrowed conservative rhetoric.
Progressive liberalism, however, is not for Deneen a repudiation of this first liberalism so much as its moralized successor. Where classical liberalism fears the people as too radical and threatening to property, progressive liberalism fears them as too traditional, too custom-bound, and too resistant to moral advance. John Stuart Mill becomes the key exemplar. He wants not merely legal liberty, but a social order that loosens the grip of custom, majority opinion, and inherited norms. Deneen reads Mill as the theorist of an elite-led moral transformation of society, one that protects dissenters and innovators against the conformist many. Progressive liberalism thus still prefers rule by the few; it simply defines the task of the few less in economic than in cultural, educational, administrative, and psychological terms.
Mill’s confidence in elite tutelage, Deneen argues, becomes clearest in his willingness to endorse coercive improvement when a population is judged backward. The familiar language of progress, rights, and liberation can therefore coexist with forms of domination. In Deneen’s reading, this logic did not disappear with formal empire. It survives in courts, bureaucracies, NGOs, corporations, media systems, and international institutions that claim to know better than ordinary people what freedom and advancement require. Progressive liberalism presents itself as humane and emancipatory, but it still treats recalcitrant populations as obstacles to be educated, managed, or overridden. The difference from classical liberalism is not whether elites should rule, but what kind of transformation they seek to impose.
Marxism enters the argument as the third version of the progressive project. It shares liberalism’s belief that history moves toward emancipation, but it shifts the revolutionary role from elites to the proletariat. Marx’s great insight, for Deneen, is his recognition that capitalism destroys traditional bonds, dissolves stable social forms, and alienates human beings through division of labor and market abstraction. In that sense Marx often asks conservative questions about social dislocation, fragmentation, and the loss of meaningful common life. But Marx gives those questions a revolutionary answer. The proletariat is supposed to become the agent that overthrows the bourgeois order and completes history through communism.
Yet Deneen argues that Marxism cannot escape the same contradiction that haunts the liberalisms it opposes. Marx yearns for a reconciled human world beyond alienation, but he also glorifies ceaseless revolutionary movement. Worse, the actual working classes often prove more conservative than Marxist theory expects: they want stability, dignity, and relief from upheaval more than endless revolution. As a result, Marxism repeatedly falls back on a revolutionary elite that must awaken, organize, or even substitute for the people. This brings Deneen to his own preferred alternative: common-good conservatism. In his four-part scheme, it is the only major modern position that does not define politics by progress. It assumes that ordinary people are instinctively conservative because they seek order, continuity, fairness, family life, and communal stability. Elites are still necessary, but only as stewards of a good shared by the whole polity. The chapter ends by presenting this as an old tradition re-emerging in new form: pro-worker, anti-atomist, socially conservative, anti-globalist, and oriented toward a political order in which the common good comes before individual choice.
Chapter 4 — The Wisdom of the People
Deneen begins this chapter with the COVID-19 pandemic because it dramatized an ancient political question in contemporary form: who is better suited to govern for the common good, the knowledgeable few or the many? The pandemic sharpened a conflict that was already underway between technocratic confidence and populist distrust. One side urged deference to experts, scientific authority, and administrative competence; the other emphasized common sense, lived experience, and suspicion of elite institutions. Deneen places this dispute in a very long intellectual lineage, tracing it back to Plato and Aristotle. His aim is not simply to retell pandemic politics, but to show that the modern struggle over expertise is a deeper regime question about who should rule and what sort of society different answers will produce.
A central claim of the chapter is that appeals to expertise are never as neutral as they sound. “Follow the science,” in Deneen’s account, tends to collapse a necessary distinction between empirical knowledge and prudential judgment. Facts do not interpret themselves, and even widely accepted facts do not mechanically dictate one uncontested political response. During COVID, disputes often turned less on whether the virus existed than on how much risk should be tolerated, how costs should be distributed, which goods should be prioritized, and who should bear the burdens of public policy. For Deneen, this showed that the invocation of science often masked moral and political choices while pretending to eliminate them. Expert language therefore becomes a way of shielding rule from democratic contest rather than merely informing public deliberation.
He then reconstructs the intellectual pedigree of expert rule. Plato’s philosopher-king is the ancient archetype, but Deneen’s real target is the modern confidence that such rule is no longer embarrassing, utopian, or exceptional. Bacon’s New Atlantis is presented as an early dream of a society guided by scientific mastery, and liberal modernity inherits that dream by making the knowledgeable class central to progress. Both libertarian and progressive versions of liberalism converge here. Some libertarians openly prefer epistocracy or political passivity among ordinary citizens; progressive reformers built the administrative state on the assumption that trained specialists could guide policy better than the public. The disagreement between these camps does not erase their shared suspicion that ordinary people are too ignorant, too impulsive, or too parochial to rule well.
Deneen gives special attention to the progressive faith that expertise can replace politics. He reads figures such as John Dewey, and even mid-century rhetoric like John F. Kennedy’s language about “technical” problems, as signs of a worldview in which public life is increasingly handed over to administrators, scientists, and managers. This is not just a method of decision-making but a social project. A society organized around expertise becomes more complex, more fluid, and more dependent on specialists; that same complexity then justifies still greater reliance on experts. In this way the authority of expertise is self-reinforcing. The more society is transformed in the name of progress, the less relevant inherited common sense appears, and the less room remains for the judgment of ordinary citizens.
Against this, Deneen revives Aristotle’s case for the political intelligence of the many. Aristotle acknowledges that some arts do require experts, but he also points out that users often judge the quality and consequences of expert work better than makers do. The diner can judge the banquet, the passenger can judge aspects of the ship, the resident can judge the house. Deneen uses this to define “common sense” not as anti-intellectualism, but as a form of practical, distributed knowledge rooted in experience. The many possess insight because they live amid the results of policy, design, and social organization. Political wisdom, therefore, cannot be reduced to technical mastery. It also requires an awareness of consequences as actually endured by ordinary people.
He then builds this argument around three strengths of common sense. First, it carries traditional knowledge: the accumulated learning embedded in habits, institutions, and inherited ways of life. Here Burke becomes the major modern witness. What innovators dismiss as prejudice may actually be a civilizational deposit of practical intelligence, the “general bank” of a people gathered across generations. Second, common sense resists the narrowing effects of specialization. It is broader, more synthetic, and therefore often closer to prudence than expert knowledge, which can be brilliant in part and foolish in the whole. Third, common sense flourishes under conditions of stability. A society that changes slowly allows old experience to guide present judgment, whereas a society devoted to permanent transformation renders inherited wisdom obsolete and thereby elevates the expert as the only figure who can navigate novelty.
This leads into one of the chapter’s strongest themes: specialization fragments not only knowledge but citizenship. Deneen uses universities as a model of the wider regime. The modern research university rewards disciplinary narrowness, professional incentives, and the production of novel knowledge, while the older idea of the college or collegium aimed at shared inquiry and the transmission of wisdom. In the older model, scholars remained embedded in a community of interpretation and judgment; in the newer one, they become isolated specialists who may know more and more about less and less. Deneen extends this critique to the whole liberal order through division of labor, citing Adam Smith, industrial assembly lines, and Wendell Berry. As work and knowledge are increasingly fragmented, people lose the habit of seeing wholes, and with it the capacity for civic judgment about the common good.
The chapter closes by linking the wisdom of the people to virtue, continuity, and scale. Common sense is strongest in relatively stable societies where ordinary virtues—frugality, moderation, responsibility, restraint—can be learned and handed down. Deneen invokes Burke’s multigenerational social contract and the anti-federalists’ suspicion that large-scale, elite-driven political systems corrode local judgment and civic character. A regime that prizes expertise tends to cultivate ambitious, mobile, nonconforming “Anywheres”; a regime that prizes the people tends to value the steadier virtues of ordinary life. But Deneen is not arguing for the abolition of expertise or elites. His conclusion is more precise: expertise has a proper place, yet it must be subordinated to a political order that honors the demos, supports stability, and directs elites toward the maintenance of ordinary decency rather than perpetual upheaval. That sets up the next chapter’s turn to the mixed constitution, where rule by the few and the many must be reconciled rather than weaponized against one another.
Chapter 5 — The Mixed Constitution
Chapter 5 argues that a genuinely conservative order rests on a tension that is not meant to become a war: culture is generated largely from below, through the habits, rituals, inherited practices, and moral intuitions of ordinary people, yet it still requires stewardship from above. Deneen’s basic claim is that democracy and aristocracy are not natural enemies when rightly understood. The people preserve the lived substance of a civilization, while elites, at their best, defend and elevate that inheritance rather than uproot it. The chapter therefore introduces the “mixed constitution” as the political form capable of joining the wisdom of the many with the discipline, prudence, and educational advantages of the few. In Deneen’s telling, the ideal regime is not one in which one class crushes the other, but one in which each restrains the characteristic vices of its counterpart.
He then turns to the classical tradition and draws a central distinction between two different meanings of “mixture.” One comes from Aristotle, for whom the goal is a real blending of classes into something new; the other comes from Polybius, for whom the elements remain distinct but are held in balance. Deneen uses vivid analogies to make the contrast clear: Aristotle’s model is like a smoothie or dough, where the ingredients lose their separateness, while Polybius’s model is like a salad, where the elements remain identifiable even though they are combined. This distinction matters because it shapes two different understandings of political health. One aims at internal social harmony through the creation of a broad middling class; the other accepts enduring conflict between social elements but tries to institutionalize a durable equilibrium among them.
In the Aristotelian version, the mixed constitution becomes what Aristotle called a polity: a regime formed by artfully combining oligarchic and democratic elements until neither predominates. Deneen stresses that this is not merely a system of checks and balances. Aristotle’s aim is not procedural stalemate but civic transformation. If successful, the regime produces a new social type, the middling citizen, who is neither corrupted by wealth nor embittered by poverty. Such a citizen is more disposed to obey reason, respect law, and act with a degree of mutual regard toward fellow citizens. The political form works because it reshapes character. The classes do not simply tolerate one another; over time, they become participants in a shared order they all have reason to preserve.
Deneen emphasizes Aristotle’s psychological analysis of class. The rich, in this account, tend toward arrogance, contempt, and an inability either to rule moderately or to be ruled at all. The poor, by contrast, tend toward envy, resentment, and a damaged sense of their own worth, which can produce either passivity or vindictive rule. A sound polity weakens both pathologies by reducing extremes of wealth and poverty and by enlarging the middling sector of society. The result is not social perfection, but a civic ethos in which affection, trust, and law-abidingness become more likely. Deneen clearly admires this vision because it treats political order as inseparable from moral formation. A regime is good not only when it distributes offices well, but when it educates citizens away from class hatred and toward a common good they can genuinely share.
The second classical model, associated above all with Polybius, begins from a darker anthropology and a more cyclical sense of history. Deneen recounts Polybius’s claim that every pure regime decays from within: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, and democracy becomes mob rule. The Roman achievement, on this view, was not to erase those tendencies but to counteract them by mixing monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy inside one institutional framework. What Sparta first designed and Rome later refined was a constitutional order in which each element checked the congenital vice of the others. For Deneen, the important point is that Polybius treats balance as a civilizational defense against degeneration. The democratic component is especially significant not because it licenses pure majority rule, but because it preserves reverence, family duty, respect for elders, and obedience to law—traits Deneen regards as the true substance of a healthy democratic culture.
Aquinas, in Deneen’s account, provides the medieval synthesis of these classical insights. Although Aquinas could praise monarchy in theory, he recognized that in practice a mixed order was more prudent and more protective of the common good. Deneen highlights Aquinas’s especially important treatment of custom. Law is not only what rulers deliberately promulgate; long-settled social practices can themselves acquire the force of law when they embody the reasoned consent of a people over time. Custom, in this account, is a preliberal form of consent, not the abstract agreement of isolated individuals, but the concrete, historical self-government of a community through habit and inherited practice. Aquinas therefore offers Deneen a powerful model of mutual dependence: the people govern much of life through custom, while rulers govern well only when they respect and preserve those customs rather than trying to dissolve them.
The chapter then shifts from antiquity and the Middle Ages to modern conservatism. Deneen argues that conservatism emerged as a response to a new kind of elite: progressive elites produced by capitalism, revolution, and liberal ideology. Against Marxist and left-liberal claims that conservatism simply defends hierarchy for its own sake, he argues that early conservatives often defended older elites because those elites were seen, at least potentially, as bulwarks against newer and more dangerous ruling groups—financial oligarchs and social revolutionaries alike. Edmund Burke becomes the key figure here. Deneen presents Burke not merely as an enemy of the French Revolution but as a critic of the emerging commercial class that treated society as a field for speculation, abstraction, and uprooting. Burke’s hostility toward “gamesters” and financial manipulators matters because Deneen wants to show that true conservatism originally opposed both ideological radicalism and the commodifying tendencies of modern capitalism.
Deneen then turns to Benjamin Disraeli and Alexis de Tocqueville to show how the mixed constitution could be adapted to modern mass society. Disraeli’s “Tory democracy” becomes, in this reading, an alliance of the working class, the aristocracy, and the church against liberal forces that were dissolving the nation’s organic institutions. The working class is depicted not as inherently revolutionary but as instinctively conservative, attached to continuity, custom, and settled ways of life. Tocqueville, meanwhile, identifies something like an American aristocracy in the professions—especially lawyers—who might preserve order and mediate between democratic energy and aristocratic restraint. But Tocqueville also warns that a harder “industrial aristocracy” could arise: detached, managerial, indifferent, and severed from the people. Deneen ends the chapter by arguing that recent political upheavals have exposed American conservatism as a species of liberalism rather than a force of conservation. What is now required, he says, is a confrontation with the reigning liberal order so that a new alliance between the many and the few can be forged. The name he gives to that coming synthesis is “aristopopulism.”
Chapter 6 — Aristopopulism
Chapter 6 takes the conceptual groundwork of the previous chapter and turns it into an overt political program. Deneen begins from the claim that contemporary liberalism has hardened into a soft but invasive form of tyranny, exercised through a combined power elite made up of progressive liberals, classical liberals, and the remnants of Marxist moral ambition. Against this bloc, he sees an emerging popular revolt coming from the working class. Yet he is clear that populism by itself is not enough. The recent American version was, in his view, energized but intellectually underformed, attached to a leader who could channel grievance without converting it into a durable governing class or coherent public philosophy. That is why he argues that the revolt of “the many” must be joined to the conscious formation of a new elite. Aristopopulism names this project: a politics in which popular force pressures the rise of rulers who understand themselves as obligated to serve the common good.
A large part of the chapter is devoted to explaining why this new elite is necessary. Deneen notes a striking reversal in modern political language. Older societies used words for upper classes that implied excellence, dignity, and obligation, while words for the masses often carried connotations of vulgarity or instability. Modern politics has inverted that moral vocabulary: “the people” now confer legitimacy, while “elite” functions mainly as an insult. But Deneen’s point is that the old conflict has not disappeared; it has merely become disguised. Today’s upper class still rules, but it denies that it is an upper class at all. Because it refuses to acknowledge its own status, it also abandons the old expectation that elites should be morally formed, schooled in duty, and judged by whether they ennoble the broader society. A society that cannot even name a virtuous ruling class, in his view, will almost inevitably get a decadent one.
That diagnosis leads to a contrast between earlier aristocratic self-formation and the present credentialed class. Deneen recalls traditions such as Aristotle’s ethics, Renaissance “mirror for princes” literature, and even John Adams’s sense that privileged leaders had a responsibility to elevate those below them. Those traditions assumed that people with advantages needed to be educated into service, restraint, and generosity. Modern elites, by contrast, are shaped in institutions that flatter them as egalitarian while training them to scorn the supposedly backward tastes and attachments of ordinary people. The result is reciprocal contempt: elites treat populists as crude and benighted, while populists increasingly see elites as hypocritical rulers who preach equality while monopolizing prestige, comfort, and power. For Deneen, the crisis is therefore moral before it is merely administrative. The problem is not just bad policy, but the collapse of nobility as an ethic.
He then argues that this moral rupture is now visible in electoral realignment. The old divide between economic conservatives and social liberals is, in his reading, giving way to a clearer conflict between the few and the many. Drawing heavily on the social map of the 2020 U.S. election, Deneen presents the credentialed professional class—tech workers, university employees, public-sector professionals, cultural gatekeepers—as one camp, and a multiracial, multiethnic working class of tradesmen, small business owners, wage earners, homemakers, and religious voters as the other. What matters to him is not race alone, nor even income alone, but social location inside or outside the institutions of status production. He therefore treats the emerging divide as civilizational: those whose lives are integrated into the “laptop class” economy increasingly stand against those whose lives depend on family stability, productive work, locality, and embodied institutions. In that sense, modern liberalism is ceasing to be an entire regime and becoming a party of the ruling class.
Deneen nevertheless rejects both of the most obvious endgames of this conflict. One would be straightforward elite domination, using media, bureaucracy, education, and corporate power to keep the masses politically contained. The other would be an undisciplined populist seizure of power ending in demagogy or dictatorship. Against both, he returns to the classical language of the mixed constitution. A successful regime cannot remain a permanent stalemate between hostile camps; it must become a true blending in which the elite is compelled to align its interests with the stable life of ordinary people. This is where he engages Michael Lind. Deneen admires Lind’s diagnosis of class conflict, but rejects the idea that mere pluralist bargaining or temporary concessions from neoliberal managers will solve the problem. He argues that the healthier mid-century order in the United States worked not simply because elites feared labor, but because the elites themselves were culturally formed by solidaristic institutions and shared a moral world closer to that of the broader population.
From there, the chapter becomes frankly strategic. Deneen draws on Machiavelli to argue that conflict is not always pathological; the tumults of the people can be necessary instruments for extracting concessions and reshaping institutions. But unlike a purely Machiavellian politics, his goal is not endless struggle for its own sake. He wants “Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends”: the deliberate use of popular pressure to create rulers who can then reorient the regime toward family life, stable work, local belonging, and moral order. Economically, that means policies aimed not only at redistributing wealth but at redistributing social capital, strengthening the conditions under which ordinary citizens can sustain homes, neighborhoods, congregations, and civic associations. He repeatedly insists that economics alone is insufficient. A common-good order must secure both material stability and the social ecology in which human beings actually flourish.
The longest part of the chapter sketches what such a program might look like. Deneen proposes a broad “mixing” of classes through institutions rather than rhetoric alone. Politically, he entertains expanding the House of Representatives dramatically so that districts become smaller, representatives more local, and “retail politics” less dependent on money and celebrity. He favors forms of representation that give weight to actual social estates or productive groups, not just to atomized individuals. He suggests dispersing concentrated power away from Washington, curbing monopolistic corporations, reviving trust-busting, rebuilding domestic manufacturing, and treating productive independence as a matter of national security. He is skeptical of a college-for-all system that feeds the professional class and instead wants public support redirected toward vocational paths, civic education, and a less monopolistic higher-education order. He also calls for aggressive enforcement against employers of illegal labor, a more morally interventionist media regime, and explicit efforts to check the cultural power of institutions that promote libertine or anti-religious norms.
The final movement of the chapter shifts from program to ethos. Deneen argues that family policy should become central to the state, pointing admiringly to pronatalist and pro-family initiatives such as those pursued in Hungary. He also insists that the deepest cultural basis for aristopopulism would be a renewed Christian public inheritance. Christianity, for him, is the historical source of an ethic in which privilege is interpreted as obligation and superiority is measured by service, sacrifice, and care for the vulnerable. That older Christian-democratic spirit, he argues, once moderated both raw capitalism and radical individualism, and must be revived if elites are to be morally transformed rather than merely frightened into compromise. The chapter therefore ends where the book’s title points: real regime change will not mean the abolition of elites, since history always produces rulers of one kind or another. It will mean forcing the current oligarchy either to become something nobler or to be replaced by leaders who deserve, in the classical sense, to be called aristoi. Aristopopulism is Deneen’s name for that attempted fusion of popular energy and genuinely aristocratic responsibility.
Chapter 7 — Toward Integration
In Chapter 7, “Toward Integration,” the author turns from diagnosis to program. The chapter’s central claim is that the crisis of liberalism cannot be solved merely by rebalancing institutions or rotating elites; it requires replacing liberalism’s basic social logic. Liberalism, in this account, is defined not simply by rights or markets, but by an “organization of separations” that divides social life into discrete, often antagonistic spheres. The postliberal alternative the chapter proposes is therefore “integration”: not a temporary coalition among hostile groups, but a deeper blending of classes, moral purposes, institutions, and ways of life. The author frames this in Aristotelian rather than liberal terms. The end of politics should not be to preserve neutral procedures among competing interests, but to shape a constitution ordered toward a shared form of flourishing. What matters, then, is less the maintenance of balance than the creation of a common life in which rulers and ruled, institutions and culture, present needs and inherited goods are once again joined.
The chapter begins by drawing on Pierre Manent’s idea that liberal democracy is marked by an “organization of separations.” The author lists several of the separations Manent identifies: division of labor, separation of powers, separation of church and state, separation of civil society and the state, separation between representatives and the represented, and separation of facts from values. These arrangements, he argues, are usually praised as the architecture of modern freedom. But the chapter insists that their cumulative effect has been corrosive. Liberal society has not merely differentiated functions; it has trained people to inhabit disconnected worlds, each governed by its own rules and insulated from wider obligations. Economic life, family life, religion, education, and political leadership all drift apart. Most importantly, the elite class that governs modern societies becomes socially, geographically, and morally detached from the people whose lives it directs. The chapter’s premise is that this fragmentation is not a side effect of liberalism. It is one of liberalism’s defining achievements. The answer, therefore, cannot be technical reform alone. It must be a deliberate movement toward reintegration across the decisive fault lines of modern life.
The first major field in which the author wants reintegration is meritocracy. He argues that meritocracy is one of liberalism’s most powerful engines of resentment because it turns inequality into a moral verdict. Winners are encouraged to believe that they deserve their status; losers are encouraged to believe that their failure is justified. The result is a social order saturated with hubris at the top and humiliation below. The chapter engages sympathetically but critically with Michael Sandel’s critique of meritocracy. Sandel’s proposal of a “lottery of the qualified” is treated as insufficient because it would still preserve the more important distinction between the qualified and the unqualified. The deepest problem is not just that meritocracy is unfairly distributed; it is that it legitimates a society built around sorting, ranking, and separating human beings. Classical liberals and progressive liberals are described as disagreeing over compensation and access while still accepting the same basic regime of winnowing. Both, in the author’s view, keep intact a society where impersonal systems replace concrete obligations between citizens.
Against that order, the chapter proposes a different moral reading of inequality. Differences in talent, station, and achievement should not be understood as evidence of desert, but as signs of mutual dependence. The author develops this point through Christian sources, especially St. Paul’s image of the social body and John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” In that tradition, unequal gifts are justified not because they license superiority, but because they create duties. Those with greater advantages are not morally entitled to detach themselves from the weaker members of society; they are stewards of gifts that should serve the whole community. The chapter also draws on Tocqueville’s admiration for New England township life, where liberty depended on habits of participation, obligation, and shared local responsibility. The point is not antiquarian. The author treats these materials as evidence that American political culture has always contained an anti-liberal inheritance, one that defines freedom less as the right to do as one pleases than as the capacity to pursue what is just and good in common. A postliberal order, then, would revive solidarity by imposing more demanding obligations on elites and by orienting institutions toward broad-based flourishing rather than competitive ascent.
The chapter next turns to race and argues that mainstream American approaches to racism remain trapped inside the same logic of separation. The classical liberal model of color-blind equality and the progressive liberal model of affirmative action are said to differ over means while sharing the same end: inclusion within the meritocratic order. In both cases, the goal is not to question the regime of sorting but to secure fairer entry into it. The author then contrasts these approaches with critical race theory, which he presents as a more radical challenge to liberalism but one that still intensifies separation by dividing society into oppressor and oppressed identities. On this account, intersectional politics does not heal the racial divide; it multiplies rival claims to victimhood while strengthening the cultural power of the professional class that administers those categories. The chapter’s underlying claim is that elite institutions benefit from managing racial conflict in ways that prevent broader solidarities from forming. Race becomes a language through which class conflict is displaced, moralized, and kept politically useful for the ruling class.
The author’s alternative is a multiracial, multiethnic solidarity rooted in the shared conditions of ordinary working people rather than in elite systems of recognition. He argues that the deterioration of black and white working-class life often has common sources in the breakdown of family, religion, communal norms, and stable economic arrangements. That argument is risky inside American history, and the chapter acknowledges that defenses of “traditional” institutions were often intertwined with racist injustices. Even so, the author insists that a serious response to racism cannot be limited to legal equality, diversity initiatives, or reparations. It must also confront the long-term destruction of the social ecologies in which human beings flourish. He points to debates over black family stability, Barack Obama’s rhetoric of paternal responsibility, and the backlash that such arguments provoked as evidence that contemporary liberal discourse increasingly treats moral and cultural repair as either inadequate or suspect. The chapter closes this section by rereading Martin Luther King Jr. less as a prophet of meritocratic inclusion than as a preacher of brotherhood, sacrifice, and shared struggle. For the author, King’s deeper language points toward solidarity, not just access.
A third domain of integration is time itself. The chapter argues that liberalism is inseparable from the ideology of progress, and that progress fragments historical experience into enlightened and backward camps. This turns politics into a battle between those who imagine themselves on the right side of history and those cast as obstacles to inevitable advancement. Economic liberals and progressive social reformers differ in what counts as progress, but both participate in the same temporal structure: the past is treated as darkness, the future as redemption, and the present as a staging ground for continuous transformation. The author contends that this temporal imagination intensifies class conflict because the elite define themselves as the carriers of progress, while those who bear its costs are dismissed as resentful, nostalgic, or morally defective. A genuinely mixed constitution, he argues, requires an “integration of time”: a politics of continuity that reconnects past, present, and future. That means replacing the modern cult of transformation with a chastened mixture of improvement and acceptance, memory and hope, inheritance and prudence.
To develop that argument, the chapter turns to William May, Wendell Berry, and especially Christopher Lasch. The author draws on May’s contrast between transformation and acceptance to show that healthy societies, like good parents, must combine aspiration with limits. Modernity, in his view, has overvalued transformation and lost the ability to count the costs of its own achievements. Lasch becomes the key guide here because he distinguished hope from optimism and memory from nostalgia. Hope is not faith in inevitable improvement; it is a realistic trust that does not deny frailty or tragedy. Memory is not a fantasy about a perfect past; it is gratitude for inheritance and awareness of what has been handed down. These dispositions, the author argues, are necessary if a society is to escape the twin pathologies of smug progressivism and embittered nostalgia. He broadens the point by listing the material and social damages created by “progress”: ecological destruction, social atomization, family instability, loneliness, political oligarchy, and deaths of despair. The chapter insists that these are not accidental side effects. They are recurring costs of a civilization incapable of subtracting losses from the ledger of innovation.
The chapter then reconsiders the nation. Here the author’s move is deliberately paradoxical: nationalism, he argues, is not originally a conservative inheritance but a major liberal achievement. The modern nation-state emerged from the effort to settle conflicts between temporal and spiritual authority, consolidate sovereignty, and redirect loyalties away from both local communities and transnational religious orders. In the American case, the Progressive Era intensified this nationalizing project, with figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Croly presenting the nation as the proper vessel of collective purpose, even of quasi-religious aspiration. In this reading, today’s conservatives who rally to nationalism are defending yesterday’s liberal construction. Meanwhile, progressives have simply moved one step further along the same path, shifting from national universalism to global universalism. The chapter rejects both options. Against liberal globalism and against a merely reactive nationalism, it proposes nested memberships: family, community, nation, and an international order of distinct nations. The nation should be neither erased nor absolutized. It should be situated within a thicker ecology of belonging, a “community of communities” rather than the sole focus of political devotion.
The final and most far-reaching section argues that no politics can avoid substantive judgments about the good, because every regime already rests on moral and quasi-theological assumptions. Liberalism claims neutrality, but the chapter argues that it inevitably generates its own dogmas and disciplines. What many people call “wokeism” is presented not as a betrayal of liberalism but as one of its logical outcomes: once public life is stripped of any acknowledged objective good, politics becomes organized around the destruction of inherited norms in the name of individual preference. The author rejects the right-liberal hope that civil society alone can restore moral order while politics remains neutral. For him, the question is unavoidable: what kind of political order makes common flourishing more possible for ordinary people? He answers by stressing the double meaning of “common”: what is shared and what is ordinary. A common good is therefore not an abstraction floating above society; it is the set of conditions that allow ordinary people to live decent, stable, meaningful lives. The test of politics is not whether it maximizes choice for the successful, but whether commoners are actually doing well.
That concern leads the chapter to religion, prayer, and the social preconditions of spiritual life. Drawing on Jean Daniélou, the author argues that freedom of religion is too thin if the surrounding culture makes prayer, rest, marriage, childrearing, and communal life increasingly difficult. Liberalism offers formal liberty while dissolving the forms of life that make human flourishing attainable in practice. The chapter treats this not as a private problem but as a political one. Public order, law, and custom can either support or corrode the habits that sustain ordinary people, especially the vulnerable. The discussion of prayer is emblematic because prayer represents dependence, restraint, transcendence, and attention to goods beyond consumption and self-assertion. A regime that cannot protect even the possibility of such practices for common people is, in the author’s eyes, not neutral but hostile to the good. The book closes this chapter, and effectively its broader argument, by calling for a new governing class committed to common-good conservatism: a postliberal politics that rejects neutrality, abandons the ruins of exhausted liberalism, and tries to rebuild social order around solidarity, shared culture, mixed government, and the flourishing of ordinary life.
Ver também
- lasch_revolt_of_the_elites_resumo — Lasch é fonte direta do Capítulo 7; Deneen usa a distinção entre esperança e otimismo e a tese da secession das elites quase sem mediação
- thymos — a crítica de Deneen à meritocracia como “veredicto moral” é exatamente a ferida thímica que o vault usa para explicar o populismo: humilhação de status, não só privação material
- fukuyama_identity — Fukuyama diagnostica a mesma crise de reconhecimento a partir de dentro do liberalismo; a leitura conjunta define os termos do debate entre reforma liberal e pós-liberalismo
- gurri_revolt_of_the_public — Gurri mapeia a revolta contra a autoridade especializada pelo mesmo período, com diagnóstico oposto: o problema é a falta de transparência, não o excesso de progresso
- lilla_once_and_future_liberal_resumo — Lilla também critica o liberalismo identitário mas defende o nacionalismo cívico como saída; o contraste com Deneen define dois finais diferentes para o mesmo diagnóstico
- wolf_crisis_of_democratic_capitalism — Wolf faz a mesma lista de patologias do capitalismo democrático mas permanece dentro do liberalismo; ler ao lado de Deneen clarifica onde a fronteira entre reforma e ruptura se situa