Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, by Patrick Deneen, Sentinel, 284 pages.

Patrick Deneen upended two generations’ worth of conservative orthodoxy with his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, a scholarly polemic that blamed our present political troubles not merely on the left’s brand of progressive liberalism but on the right’s embrace of “classical” liberalism. In his latest offering, Deneen performs an even more revolutionary feat in the genre of conservative political writing: he offers solutions.

Regime Change begins where Why Liberalism Failed left off. “We are inexorably entering the time after liberalism,” the author declares. The post–World War II political divide that pitted right-liberal Republicans against left-liberal Democrats, libertarians against progressives, has given way to an older political divide: the few versus the many, the elites versus “the people.”

For all their differences, “conservative” Republicans and “liberal” Democrats have spent the last seventy years pursuing a disastrously similar policy of progress. Republicans wrought progress by deregulating the economy; Democrats did the same in the social sphere. Republicans might have talked a good game about the importance of conserving traditional values, but their simultaneous calls for “creative destruction” doomed any chance they might have had to conserve much of anything at all. Left-wing liberals criticized their right-wing counterparts’ economic policies, but astute progressives recognized that “capitalism necessarily displaces local practices and beliefs…in favor of a universalized commercial ethos.”

And so the two sides of liberalism, ostensibly in opposition, were “revealed to be identical, monolithic, and eager to deploy power in the name of enforcing individual expressivism.” Some people prospered, at least materially, but the people as a whole suffered. Gross domestic product grew, but life expectancy shrank. 

Today, “the consequences of unfettered progress are no longer acceptable to the demos.” Deneen sees this increasing hostility between the people and the elite as a defining feature of the liberal regime, which thrives on separation: of professions, powers, church from state, civil society from state, facts from values, representatives from the people they represent. Each class falls further into its characteristic vices, exacerbated by a beguiling belief in meritocracy that elites believe absolves them of any real responsibility toward their poorer countrymen. The wealthy, as Aristotle observed, become arrogant and base, while the poor become petty, capricious, and vengeful. Hence the need for a mixed regime in which “distinct virtues of the two respective classes ought ideally to correct the vices inherent to its opposite.” Deneen calls this mixed regime “aristo-populism.”

Deneen’s conservatism does not begin with Barry Goldwater or even Edmund Burke but with “ancients such as Aristotle, Polybius, and Aquinas,” who “had no word for ‘conservatism’” but “offered its original articulation.” Only in the throes of the French Revolution did philosophers such as Burke present this classical conception of society as “a self-conscious conservatism that…fully recognized that a bottom-up culture needed explicit and self-conscious defense by a cultured elite that previously had not recognized the extent to which it was—or should be—aligned with the broad popular sentiments of the people.” The liberal revolution made conservatives see themselves as such.

In recent decades, conservatives have tended to blame Marxism for all the ills of the modern world, talking as if Marxists lurked under every rock. But Marx, for all his sins, cannot be blamed for fulfilling the promises of liberalism: the rationalism that has eroded our cultural inheritance, the cosmopolitanism that uprooted traditional communities, the skepticism that sidelined religion, the individualism that dismantled the family, the materialism that strangled the desire for virtue. Marxism led to many of the same problems in the nations that embraced it, such as China and the Soviet Union. But the West, for all of Marx’s influence, has remained liberal. And liberalism has sufficed to accomplish these ends.

Marx reserved many of his most searing critiques for liberalism, his main ideological competitor. Rather than castigate Marx, Deneen embraces his diagnoses, especially on the subject of class struggle. In the most insightful section of Regime Change, Deneen draws his readers a chart comparing and contrasting progressive liberalism, classical liberalism, Marxism, and conservatism. The two varieties of liberalism share a preference for elite governance over government by the people. They disagree over the nature of the people, whom classical liberals such as John Locke considered revolutionary and progressive liberals such as John Stuart Mill considered conservative. Likewise, both Karl Marx and the conservative Edmund Burke favored government by the people, at least in theory, but they disagreed over the people’s revolutionary fervor, upon which Marx relied but which Burke doubted.

Deneen unsurprisingly sides with Burke and Benjamin Disraeli in his view of conservatives as the party of the people. “A dominant narrative among left-intellectuals,” Deneen laments, “is that conservatism is the ideology of the elite, aligned with those who seek to preserve the wealth, status, and power of the upper classes against the egalitarian longings of the people.” If that narrative ever were true, it hasn’t been since at least 2012, when Democrats supplanted Republicans as the party of the rich. Today, Democrats caricature Republicans, not as rich Uncle Pennybags, but as “deplorables,” poor country bumpkins who cling bitterly to their guns and religion as ceaseless waves of liberal progress wash away their position in society. 

Deneen encourages conservatives to embrace “a multiracial, multiethnic working class” coalition, a phrase he repeats often. Marx, too, wanted the workers of the world to unite. But other attachments, not least among them race, have always seemed to get in the way. Deneen acknowledges the risk that racial division poses to populist unity. “Just as the conditions for working class solidarity across racial lines became increasingly possible, the ruling class changed the narrative,” he notes. “Wealthy, well-educated blacks were to be understood to be as oppressed as those in the black working class, while those in the declining white working class enjoyed ‘privilege.’”

He’s right that elite liberals inflame racial strife for political ends. Unfortunately, the strategy seems to be working as well today as ever. In 2020, Donald Trump won just 8 percent of the black vote—the same percentage he won in 2016 and just two points more than establishment darling Mitt Romney received in 2012.

Deneen inveighs against the ways in which racial tensions “end up reinforcing the advantages of the managerial classes,” but he never quite explains how to overcome this obstacle other than to suggest that we supplant the popular bogeyman of “systemic racism” with “systemic liberalism,” racial minorities’ true enemy. Deneen points to a little-remembered passage in Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, in which King appeals to the sort of Christian solidarity extolled in Governor Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity.” Would that it were so simple. One fears the aristo-populists will have to get more creative to crack Democrats’ monopoly on the black vote.

In the final third of the book, Deneen offers refreshingly specific policy proposals, including government support for family growth, a national service requirement, mandatory domestic manufacturing in certain sectors, protective tariffs, an electoral system that prefers caucuses to primaries, a curtailing of university education, and incentives to encourage elite graduates to seek employment outside the handful of speculative industries that presently entice them. That last suggestion brought to mind my own senior year at Yale, when the university’s career services office dispatched three advisory emails on job opportunities: one for finance, one for consulting, and one for “non-traditional career paths.”

Deneen’s proposals hearken back to neglected strains of Anglo-American populism, from the Anti-Federalists of the 18th century up through the distributists of the early 20th century. He calls for a radical expansion of Congress to weaken the power of placeless, “speculative men” and to incentivize “local knowledge,” in the words of Anti-Federalist Melancton Smith. He also proposes the representation of various “estates” in addition to locales, such that we might include “a farmer, a wage earner, and a small businessman on the Federal Reserve Board.”

Through his exaltation of local and specific interests, Deneen offers a helpful corrective to the recent conservative enthusiasm for nationalism, which the author reminds us “was originally a key aspect of the liberal political project.” Nationalist sentiment swelled in the United States during the progressive administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Nationalism as a world order dates back several centuries to the Peace of Westphalia and earlier the Treaty of Augsburg, which sought to settle the wars of religion by replacing “a transnational Christian order” with “the unitary sovereignty of the political ruler, one of whose main powers was to declare the religious belief within the boundaries of his own political territory.” Pre-modern peoples such as Catholics and Jews thus pose a problem for nationalism by their enduring loyalty to entities beyond the liberal nation. Surveying the present field of prominent postliberals, one cannot help but notice the outsize influence of these groups.

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Deneen resolves the tension between nationalism and conservatism not by rejecting the nation, as the left-liberals do, but by considering it in its proper place as a community of communities within a “community of nations.” This conservative conception of world order does not erase particular distinctions into a global blob of liberalism but embraces, fosters, and protects “not only the nation but that which is both smaller and larger than the nation.” 

Deneen concludes his survey at the largest, most comprehensive level of all: religion. While the liberal order today treats religion as an eccentric personal hobby, Deneen observes that “prayer is a central practice of a flourishing human life” and therefore “belongs not to the strictly interior life of man—with which politics has nothing to do—but to the political sphere.” We will order ourselves and our society according to something or other. We will either pursue a coherent vision of the good with integrity, or we will persist down our present path of practiced incoherence and disintegration.

Five years ago, post-liberalism seemed a fringe position. Today, it counts among its adherents some of the right’s most prominent voices, who not only look back for a return to tradition but look forward “toward a postliberal future.” Patrick Deneen launched Why Liberalism Failed in relative obscurity. He debuted Regime Change onstage with a U.S. senator. At this rate of persuasion, one half-expects Deneen to launch his next book next to a president.