The years following the populist earthquakes of 2016 have seen much soul-searching among the establishment class. Countless articles, books, and panels have made everyone an expert on the “rise of populism.” But most of the answers put forward offer only surface-level analysis of our present discontent. This is not so for Patrick Deneen's widely discussed Why Liberalism Failed. The book is an antidote to the shallowness that so often characterizes our discourse about what ails much of the West. Deneen's thesis is simple, yet profound: “Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.”
But if Deneen's argument is essentially correct, his success may also end up leading to failure. If liberalism is failing and there is indeed a post-liberal horizon, it may be far more dystopian than what it is replacing. Deneen presents liberalism as an ideology that emerged in a vacuum, rather than under particular historical and philosophical circumstances. But pre-modern Christian ideals and liberalism are more interconnected than he would have the reader believe.
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