America Doesn't Need Regime Change

My review of Patrick Deneen's new book

The review begins like this:

There are many ways to measure the ascendance of rightwing antiliberalism across the democratic world since the middle of the 2010s. In several countries, right-populists have displaced neoliberal politicians and center-right parties. In some of these places, they’ve won power. Even where they haven’t, their critiques of party establishments on immigration, free trade, crime, foreign policy, and social issues have shifted the terms of debate away from the consensus that prevailed over the past several decades. And then there’s what might be called the migration of utopian energies from the Left to the Right in recent years.

I wasn’t a conservative as a teenager, but I was in my 20s and early 30s. That was during the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was common for center-right intellectuals to define themselves in opposition to the utopian hopes associated with the counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s. They were irresponsible and foolish radicals, willing to topple the imperfect but decent and hard-won institutions of liberal democracy in pursuit of an airy and ill-considered ideal. We were hard-nosed realists, keenly attuned to the fragility of these institutions and the need to defend and protect them against the reckless idealists.

What we didn’t perceive at the time is that, with the end of the Cold War, some of these utopian hopes had migrated to our own rightward-leaning precincts of the liberal center. What was talk of the universal triumph of liberal democracy—let alone an impulse to impose it onto a recalcitrant Middle East at the point of a gun—if not an expression of a longing to see the world conform to and be remade on the model of an abstract ideal?

But that utopian moment didn’t last. Like Hegel’s World Spirit, alighting from one form of social life to another down through the millennia, the utopianism of the liberal center faded, its energies moving on in search of a new patch of fertile ground in which to take root and flourish. What I couldn’t have imagined back during my conservative years is that, for the first time in nearly eight decades, the longing for revolutionary change would find a home a decade or so later on the antiliberal Right.

I first met Patrick J. Deneen 19 years ago….

You can read the rest (with no paywall) at Quillette, and I very much hope you will. The subject-matter couldn’t be more relevant to the work I do here. If I hadn’t been invited to write about the book elsewhere, I surely would have done a post about it. As it is, you’ll have to follow the link to read my response to Deneen’s argument. (As the headline implies, I didn’t like it very much.)

My next post will be published late this week. See you then.