The Tocqueville Option and the Benedict Option: Conservative Thought in Search of a Post-Liberal Alternative
Below, the prominent Russian political philosopher Boris Mezhuev takes a look at American post-liberalism and populism, compares the thought of Patrick Deneen and Michael Lind, and ponders what it all means for the future of ‘conservatism.’ [1] Mezhuev, long-time friend of the Simone Weil Center, is professor of the history of Russian philosophy at Moscow State University and director of the editorial board of the magazine Russian Idea (Russkaya Idea). He recently joined the editorial board of Landmarks.
The crisis of the conservative mainstream, both in the Western world and in our own country, has recently given rise to new and interesting trends, which, even if they are still at the stage of schools of thought or intellectual persuasion, in the future are no doubt destined to play a significant role on the historical stage. This latter holds true in particular for post-liberalism, a school which has a number of interesting theorists, and includes the political and religious philosopher Patrick Deneen and the philosopher and historian of political thought David C. Schindler.
In a 2019 article,[2] the neoconservative American writer Matthew Continetti, who is William Kristol's son-in-law, pointed to the crisis of modern American conservatism and identified four of its new branches, each of which differs significantly from the conservative mainstream that formed at the turn of the 1950s-1960s and which, in various variations, persisted up to the presidency of Donald Trump.
The article would not have been particularly noteworthy had its author not singled out post-liberalism, which is still not very well known in wider political circles, as one of the particular new potential directions of conservative thought. Continetti argued that the main feature of post-liberalism is that it no longer recognizes freedom as the highest value for society. According to the journalist, the works of post-liberal theorists are distinguished by their criticism of those pillars of the Enlightenment that influenced American statehood at its very origins. The post-liberals direct their main line of attack against the political heritage of English philosopher John Locke and his interpretation of freedom. Continetti’s conclusion is as follows: in as much as its positions vis-à-vis freedom are extremely alien to the American way of thinking, the post-liberal ideological trend will never gain favor in the United States.
Paul Grenier, an American political philosopher and founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy, and himself an adherent to the post-liberal trend of thought, provided a response to Continetti's article.[3] According to Grenier, post-liberals criticize not the value of freedom itself, but instead the extremely formal interpretation of this value in liberal thought. As a result of its formal reading of freedom, liberal freedom itself gets shorn of the actuality of both a social and a religious content. All the post-liberals, despite their various differences, agree that it is liberalism that has pushed Western society onto its current path: a looming societal dead end; the threat of moral disintegration; and the almost totalitarian imposition of atheism, albeit an atheism tempered by some still-vaguely distinguishable prospects for spiritual revival on a purely neopagan basis. Further, they all agree on liberalism leading to the sharp exacerbation of economic inequality. In such a situation, some of the post-liberals urge conservatives to abandon the hopeless struggle for social renewal and choose for themselves the option of voluntary isolation from society in the community of religiously like-minded people.
There can be no doubt that for most outside observers the concept of "post-liberalism" is associated first and foremost with the professor of political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Patrick Deneen and his 2018 book, "Why Liberalism Failed." It is no exaggeration to say that the book, which was released in January 2018, immediately became an intellectual sensation. Suffice it to say that The New York Times, the largest American newspaper, devoted three responses to this work, two of which were written by such influential columnists of the publication as David Brooks and Ross Douthat. These authors, as well as the third reviewer, Jennifer Salai, approached their analysis of Deneen's book with scrupulous care and attention, even though, naturally, none of them agreed with the conclusion that liberalism had failed. They pointed to the fact of continuing solidarity and mutual assistance, which, of course, are still very much present as features of modern American life and have not been nullified by liberalism of any sort. That the book nonetheless attracted the attention of such influential liberal reviewers, and received generally good press, may be explained in part by the circumstance that Deneen, like other post-liberals, has a rather cool attitude towards Trump. The fact that conservatives, including religious conservatives, have agreed to consider as their political representative a person who is clearly not a model of family virtues and whose conduct, on the whole, is far from any acceptable code, is itself for Deneen vivid evidence of that crisis which, in his view, has led the American political community to its current state of decline.
To overcome this crisis, according to Deneen, the U.S. must first overcome "liberalism" – i.e., the complex of views that is at the heart of this political philosophy and which, at the same time, determines to this day the political system of the United States. What, then, is the meaning of liberalism, the ideology whose roots Deneen traces to the writings of John Locke and Machiavelli? Liberalism conceives, firstly, of the person as an egoistic being striving only for his own advantage. Freedom for such a person consists in nothing other than the absence of obstacles on the path to egoistic happiness. It is easy to see that what we are talking about here is that "negative" freedom which was the subject of analysis in the famed essay by John Stuart Mill, and which the British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin subsequently defined as the ideological foundation of liberalism.
It was precisely on the basis of “negative” freedom that the Founding Fathers created the political system of the United States, with its system of political checks on power, its balancing of the branches of government, etc. By contrast, the earlier conception of politics in the ancient and Medieval worlds, and as perhaps best represented by Aristotle’s Politics, put its main emphasis on the virtues of man within the polis, on the feeling of moral solidarity among one’s fellow citizens. These latter virtues, to be sure, were preserved among the citizens of America, but not because of, but rather in spite of liberalism; they were the fruits of the strong religious convictions of Americans. The negative side of liberalism was restrained by the religious culture of Christianity, but as soon as personal faith began to fade in the 20th century, liberalism began to show its true face. It turned out that this ideology is not all that much better than those with whom it had fought -- that is, communism and fascism. What Liberalism aims to liberate man from is not despotism, as such – certainly not only that. It means also to ‘liberate’ man in the sense of breaking his ties with previous generations and removing his concern for future generations. Nor is the matter limited only to this. The very consciousness of our moral solidarity with our fellow citizens is also perceived by liberalism as a fetter on the path of unbound selfishness - the only true ontology of social existence. Put simply, liberalism was already at its origins and from the moment of its birth an anti-Christian and anti-polis philosophy. In an age of ever-increasing inequality and the legalization of sexual libertinism, liberalism is simply taking off its contingent Protestant mask.
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“As regards their description of the ‘class alliance’ of the intellectuals and global managers, and their fears about its destructive consequences, Lind and Deneen are absolutely united.”
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It is probable that there is a fair bit of Catholic partiality in Deneen's position. It is unlikely that John Locke and all Locke’s followers throughout the era of the Enlightenment consciously fought against what they might have termed Christianity ‘correctly understood’ (from their point of view). As Protestants they of course considered man to be born in a state of sinful selfishness and saw their task as limiting sin, including with the help of a properly organized state. But Deneen believes that the preservation of the moral solidarity of the elites with the masses, which still existed, say, in the 1950s, was due to the remnants of Christian belief in ruling circles, and he brings this argument to bear in a dispute with his ideological allies – that is to say, with those conservatives who share the philosopher's negative view of the situation in the modern world, but who believe salvation lies in a reformed liberalism.
Which subject brings us to one of the brightest intellectuals of modern America, the scholarly journalist and economic theorist Michael Lind, who released this year his latest book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite. In fact, as regards his critical description of the current reality, Lind seems to be following in Deneen's footsteps. "Managerial elites" (a term introduced by James Burnham, author of the famous book "The Managerial Revolution") are those who comprise the social stratum consisting of educated professional managers. According to Lind, these have become the new ruling class of modern society, merging to the point of indistinguishability with the enterprise owners. What is worse, the academic community, those whom Deneen refers to as the “intellectual class” (the producers and translators of knowledge), is generally at one with this elite social stratum, even if it periodically rebels against it (witness the entire Bernie Sanders phenomenon). But when it comes to a real threat to the existence of the system as such, the class of intellectuals for the most part realizes that its own interests are at one with those of the top managers in global corporations.
Post-Christianity, the rejection of traditional family morality and confessional identity: these constitute the common ideological platform of the united intellectual class and the class of top managers. The break with family and faith allowed the managerial elite to define class conflict with ordinary working people in terms of a cultural confrontation with а supposedly backward and unprogressive lower stratum stubbornly resisting the movement of history. This is what explains the whole well-known shift of the political Left towards cultural issues - in the direction of such themes as feminism, LGBT rights, the abolition of any religious taboos on scientific research. The problem is not simply that the Left has, as it were, stopped fighting for the actual rights of working people, having become fascinated with topics of interest only to themselves. That would be bad enough, but still manageable. In reality, the situation is far worse. The Left has developed the language of a new ideological domination of the progressive elites over the dark masses. And here we must honestly agree with Deneen, this phenomenon is far from new, if we recall, for example, the philosophy of the French materialists of the 18th century which was called upon to play a similar role, and probably would have played it, had it not entered into irreconcilable conflict with the anti-elite sentiments of the so-called Third Estate.
As regards their description of the ‘class alliance’ of the intellectuals and global managers, and their fears about its destructive consequences, Lind and Deneen are absolutely united. Both thinkers understand the function of the fashionable intellectual repertory consisting of postmodernism, cultural Marxism, and secular progressivism; that its task as an ideology is the suppression of the real interests of real workers. Beyond that, however, we come up against important differences between the two authors, and in these differences we discover what separates left-wing liberalism from conservative post-liberalism. Michael Lind is by no means a religious conservative. He adheres to altogether secular values; indeed, at one time he left the ranks of the neoconservatives precisely because of their alliance with the religious right. He does not believe in a coming revival of religious faith, neither in America nor in the West as a whole. In his view, the process of secularization is irreversible. The only way to force the elites to reckon with the masses is through fear, the fear of a new revolution of the ‘lower classes,’ the first flare-up of which can be found in the appearance of Donald Trump in the White House.
In Lind’s view, the current American president, and populism in general, can contribute to the creation of a healthier American society by serving as a kind of political bogeyman. In this sense, Lind is guided by the concept of ‘democratic pluralism,’ in the sense of a balancing of powers and interests. It is a position that has much in common with the ‘constitutional equilibrium’ theory of the French historian Francois Guizot, except in this case applied to the realities of the 21st century West.
For his part, the Catholic traditionalist Patrick Deneen has a different favorite French thinker: Alexis de Tocqueville. Of interest here is the latter’s analysis of the origins of democracy in America in the eponymous book published in 1832. As is well known, Tocqueville believed that what forms the very foundation of American democracy is the involvement of the majority of the country's citizens in the process of self-government at the level of local city and town. However, individualism stemming from a radically rethought Protestantism holds a potential threat to the unity of the polis. If individualism triumphs over the polis, then the citizen will find himself face to face with power at the level of the federal government. In that case, any possible moral solidarity between elites and the masses will become wholly dependent on the presence of religious belief among the upper strata of society. Should the elites become convinced of their superhuman nature, henceforward no one will be able to force them to reckon with those they will consider to be of the lower orders – those riff-raff who failed to escape their patriarchal slavery. It should be noted that, following in this respect the British social philosopher Karl Polanyi, Deneen believes that capitalism as a system leads to the systematic de-Christianization and moral devastation of society. The free market arouses no positive feelings in him.
It can be seen that Deneen, unlike Lind, does not pin very high hopes on the formal rights of suffrage and even less on the willingness of voters to make use of it to put fear in the hearts of the elite by means of some sort of Trump, or the future equivalent thereof. Lind’s ‘democratic pluralism’ is by no means Deneen’s political reference point. The image of a depraved elite, letting fall some crumbs from their high incomes to the equally depraved, but only less-well-fed masses, clearly does not fire his imagination. Deneen for his part proposes something else: the political activation of local communities. As he himself writes, new classes must enter the scene, relying for their support on the concrete realities of factory workshop, polling station, and church community (“guild, ward, and congregation”). The close-knit local cell of conservative resistance must impose its ethos on a decaying world.
The philosopher’s detailed response to Lind can be found in his essay “Replace the Elite,”[4] at the end of which Deneen, with characteristic radicalism, insists that the policy of curbing the appetites of the elites is not enough: the corrupted ruling class should not be contained, but changed. Hence his conclusion -- Christianity must be political, it must have a clear political projection, and this can be based on the revival of local city government. The task is not to isolate oneself from the large community, but to achieve its complete political reformatting: it must be assumed that politicians who have formed within the conservative communities will then be able to influence the national agenda. Christianity should not turn away from the world; on the contrary, it should go into the world with the aim of its spiritual and political transformation. Deneen's project is sometimes referred to as “the Tocqueville Option,” thereby contrasting this post-liberal version with what is represented within the same intellectual movement by the blogger and publicist of The American Conservative, Rod Dreher, author of the widely popular book The Benedict Option, published a year before Deneen’s, in 2017.
Translated by Paul Grenier, Simone Weil Center
Notes
[1]Mezhuev’s essay is an excerpt from chapter three of Transformatsia ideologii: zapadnyi mir posle globalizma i populizma (Ideological Transformation: The West after Globalism and Populism). Forthcoming, Moscow.
[2]Matthew Continetti, “Making Sense of the New Right,” The Free Beacon, May 31, 2019 https://freebeacon.com/columns/making-sense-of-the-new-american-right/
[3]Paul Grenier, “Matthew Continetti’s Take on Post-Trump Conservatism: Some Critical Reflections,” Russkaya Idea, Aug. 21, 2019. https://politconservatism.ru/articles/metyu-kontinetti-o-posttrampovskom-amerikanskom-konservatizme-kriticheskaya-refleksiya
[4] Patrick Deneen, “Replace the Elite,” First Things, March 2020. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/replace-the-elite