Thoughts on extremist right wing political belief
I worry about books like this. Deneen scored a best-seller that Barak Obama plugged as a valuable critique of liberalism that "liberals ignore at their own peril." So he's got name recognition, the NYT sees fit to review the book along with other major outlets, and yet it's an intellectual justification for overthrowing the US government, as I will argue.
Patrick Deneen was bad enough when he wrote the best-seller, Why Liberalism Failed (the one plugged by Obama), but since then has become far more extreme. Now Deneen is providing a thinly veiled call for the overthrow of the US Gov't in the name of "aristopopulism" which is an oxymoron (Aristocracy and Populism are opposites) ; and one he coins and exploits to make it seem like the "aristoi" (elites, "aristocrats") who would lead the charge really understand the "common people" and their desires and interests. It's for the "Aristoi" (elites) to give the masses what they really desire and what serves their interests. But if there's actually is such a majority consensus, then what's in the way of "giving the people what they want?" Well, says Deneen, "Liberalism" stands in the way.
OK. Then just what is meant by "Liberalism?" What is he referring to when he exhorts "us" (who are "we?") to, as he puts it at the end of his new book, "abandon the ruins we have made, seek shelter and build anew." ?? He was pretty clear about what he means in a 2020 article that appeared in Newsweek with a rebuttal from conservative National Review editor, Jonah Goldberg, called "Blame it All On Locke." There he writes:
Conservatives such as George Will and Jonah Goldberg , and liberals such as Yascha Mounk and Barack Obama—for all their differences—believe that America is liberal, and that the way out of our current political brokenness is to restore its liberal foundations. While people differ about how to define American liberalism, there is a broad consensus-- to begin with the Declaration of Independence. https://www.scribd.com/arti...
We're talking about the minimum basics here-- Lockean Liberalism which predates the US, but which is inscribed in the Declaration of Independence. The pillars of this liberalism are the stuff of all American cliches, and all who give lip service to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights along with the 14th Am. routinely affirm it. Put in 18th C quasi-religious terms (i.e. invoking "the creator" as guarantor of liberties) it is what American Democracy, such as it has been, was built on from the 19th C forward. Deneen is targeting egalitarianism and human rights, the 2 pillars of all modern variants of liberal democracy. That's why he goes back to the Lockean Declaration of Ind.
"All [persons] are created equal...[and] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
This is what he wants to trash and not "Liberalism" as in the stereotypes of left-leaning Americans employed by Republicans routinely. No, this is far more radical. That's why despite his elitism (the "aristoi" or aristocrats of his imaginings), he appeals to the "common people" and "the common good." Read between the lines and he's using an old political strategy, attributing some "common" beliefs and interests to those who are as yet too inarticulate to state them for themselves. It is what "the people" WOULD believe if only they knew their own interests. This idea has roots in Rousseau's General Will (in which you can be "forced to be free" if you depart from the alleged universal will) and Lenin's Vanguard Party which exists to instill the right beliefs (class consciousness) into those who aren't bright enough to have figured things out for themselves yet. Indeed, Deneen slyly nods to his ideological nemesis, Lenin, in the last section of the book which is named after Lenin's pamphlet, "What Is To Be Done?"
Like Trump's claim to be the "voice of all real Americans," the claim is as preposterous as it is ancient, "I am your voice." So, extremist right wing elites channel and direct the unspoken will of the confused masses? You bet. If you want to overthrow a centuries old consensus, you'd better have "the people" on your side. If the majority really are NOT on your side, well then just SAY that they really are, and would say so if they were more articulate! That's the fake-populism all around us today in the MAGAverse. The double-talk of elitism or aristocracy that blends perfectly with populism. We see such rhetorical gestures also in MAGA elites like, say, Michael Flynn and others who are on record encouraging a coup in the name of "the people." Of course, there are significant minorities of the masses who have signed on, as support for 1/6 pardons in this country shows. That's why playing these intellectual games is no joke. His book fans the flames of violence and conflict.
The NYT reviewer-- and others-- see Deneen as being self-deluded enough to really believe that his version of the "common good" is, as she says, "beyond discussion." He writes, she says, as if all this is perfectly "obvious." She finds that "chilling." That's a naive reading in my opinion. If he *really* thought it was so obvious, if he thought everybody-- or the majority-- was down with his program of authoritarian theocracy, he wouldn't need to write this book. So why does he write *as if* his vision is shared by the vast majority of people already? Or at least as if they share his vision "deep down" but haven't managed to articulate it programatically, which is the job of the "aristoi" or revolutionary right wing elites? The answer is that he's appealing to the post-Trumpist MAGAverse (whether it's Trump or DeSantis would be a minor snag). I think he knows that the closest thing to his imagined "aristocracy" is the MAGA-type authoritarianism which he never *explicitly* endorses in the book. Yet in 2019 he signed an open letter called Against The Dead Consensus, published on First Things. Here is the thesis statement of that letter followed by a link for the curious:
[W]e speak with one voice: There is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016. Any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right....Yes, the old conservative consensus paid lip service to traditional values. But it failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else. It surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism. [Deneen's name is 3rd down from the top of the signatories here: https://www.firstthings.com... ]
You know you're talking to a revolutionary when the "failed consensus" in question isn't even the opposing party anymore, but the "dead wood" from the Republican past (bad as that was) including Reagan, Libertarianism, The Tea Party, etc. etc. That's what must be purged before "the revolution" can occur.
How, then, can we believe there's any "common good" consensus among the majority of Americans, if Deneen and his fellow radical right wing intellectuals are still busy trying to complete the internal takeover of their own party? There is no majority held "common good" like the one he spells out. His American majority looks like nothing any public opinion polls represent as being close to majority positions, and he knows it.
That's why he shares the stage with people like Ted Cruz, anti-woke propagandist, Christopher Ruffo, J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley et al. at extremist bashes like the Conference for National Conservatives. Like them, he wants to wipe out the pre-Trump Republicans and go on to grab power much as Victor Orban, with whom Deneen is freindly, has done. Like many of these MAGAfied and CN allies, he says we must trash Church/State separation, ban *all* abortions, outlaw all pornography, ban books that "groom" the youth, etc. etc. He goes as far as to say we must "reclaim" the "Puritanism that predates the founding" (see his article: Blame it all on John Locke linked above). Referring to the Puritans of New England, the Catholic Immigrants and even Muslim Immigrants (in a bid to appear very ecumenical) he there writes of a religious alternative to the Declaration of Independence's philosophical roots in Lockean Liberalism:
These Abrahamic traditions, in their various ways, taught radically different lessons [from the Declaration of Independence] about ourselves: including the belief that “independence” from others and from nature is not the true form of freedom, but the longing that drove Lucifer from heaven; that rights are merely aggressions against others without more fundamental duties and obligations; that human society and government is rightly ordered and directed by natural and eternal laws, and not infinitely malleable according to human caprice. (see link above)
Now when a very knowledgeable political theorist (and he is one) starts to invoke "Natural and Eternal Laws" in a passage that debunks our founding documents, we're looking at a dangerous man . For--- and this is vital-- he is not simply pretending to know what the "common good" is, but more importantly the "natural and eternal laws" of God. And he does, like his Notre Dame compatriot Amy Conan Barrett, operate from that "divinely informed" perspective. The thing is that once you claim the mantle of God's will or divine law, your right back to the middle ages and the notion of ruling by "divine rights." Is he "going medieval" on us? Well, he does write wistfully about the way 18th century Liberalism came to replace the stable "order of things" that prevailed before that time:
This philosophy [18th century Liberalism derived largely from John Locke] sought especially to overthrow an older system that defined humans by their birthright—noble or serf, aristocrat or commoner, king or subject. It was a world in which your name was who you would be (Smith, Weaver, Taylor) or defined you by whom or where you came from (O’Connor, Johansson, von Trapp). Liberalism was, perhaps above all, a declaration of independence from any identity that we did not ourselves choose—the embrace of a frontier in which who we were was simply who we wished to become. One of the reasons Americans have fixated on The Great Gatsby is because Jay Gatsby embodies the dream of becoming a completely new person—no longer the Midwest provincial, but now the swank and sophisticated New York financier whose abandoned past is a thing of speculation and mystery, and whose future can only be imagined. (ibid)
Oh, the evils of social mobility! What evils have we unleashed? So, are we really dealing with a latter-day Joseph de Maistre here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
I don't think so. He's not as reactionary as it might seem, and more pragmatic than at first appears to be the case. I think, like his kindred confidence man, Viktor Orban, he uses the rhetoric of Christian Traditionalism as a fig leaf for a postmodern form of authoritarianism that is not unlike the "Spin Dictatorships" discussed in an earlier post elsewhere. Orban, who spoke at CPAC last year in Texas, talks constantly about his "illiberal democracy" (his own term of choice) safe-guarding the "great European tradition of Christian civilization and values." But how religious is Hungary in reality? Not very. Unlike the US there is no large minority of zealots there to match our evangelicals. Hungary scores low on religiosity even relative to other countries in its region. (see Hungarian Evangelicals Thank God for Viktor Orban: Christianity Today, 4/18/22 and Orban Deploys Christianity with a Twist to tighten grip in Hungary: The Guardian: 7/14/19)
Fake religion. Fake traditionalism. Fake populism. Fake patriotism. Fake interpretations of the "will of the founders." Everything is fake but one thing.... POWER. After calling for "the creation of a new elite aligned with the values and needs of "ordinary working people," Deneen (in Part III of the book, entitled "What Is To Be Done?") states in boldface type that what we need is the "application of Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends."[sic] (Deneen: Ch. 6: 2023). He then quotes Machiavelli on the need to sometimes resort to "extralegal and almost bestial methods." (ibid) Clearly, 1/6 just didn't cut it for Professor Deneen. And as I've said, there are many others with access to both power and money involved in the MAGAsphere.
The NYT review gives the impression that this stuff is fanciful or daft. It may be if taken literally. But I view this book as being in the genre of, say, Carl Schmitt, who gave an aura of academic respectability to Nazis in his theoretical works, or Dugin's seemingly unrealistic Eurasionism which caught Putin's ear years ago (he's the guy Ukrainians tried to assassinate but they ended up killing his daughter in a car bombing). It's naive to think that just because Trump is intellectually vacant, the MAGA movement doesn't have its own "high brow" apologists in the intelligentsia, just as it has in the Republican donor class, and various lobbies. Further, books like this apply equally well if, say, DeSantis miraculously stages a comeback and wins, or some other unforeseen MAGAt. It may sound absurd, but this is, in my opinion, a well educated political theorist's apologia for MAGA authoritarianism. It attempts to provide theoretical, even ideological foundations for what is really a nihilistic power orgy as happy to use books like this as to use the cultural trash of Q-anon and the like. Remember, the first goal is to purge the Jonah Goldbergs and other "old-fashioned" Republicans from the right wing ecosystem by whatever means are required. That's what Deneen says and I take him at his word.
Fortunately, I think all of this will fail, but not before we see some real conflict in our country. Note that the first part of the book is entitled "Our Cold Civil War" -- so despite all this talk of a unanimous "common good" for the "ordinary working people," the author is aware that in truth the country is so badly divided as to be in a condition verging on actual civil war. He's not as daft or out of touch as some reviewers think. He's just engaged in--I think-- deliberate obscurantism and double-speak, like Trump when he contradicts himself and hammers away absurdly, or the doublespeak in Orwell. And this book is much more synched into what has become the default GOP elite in Washington and much of the country than at first appears to be the case. Being a call for "extra-legal and almost bestial methods" to change our regime, I'd say this book is seditious.
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