Regime Change E-Book

Patrick Deneen

• Herausgeber: Forum
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 403

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHERS PROMISED THAT SWEEPING AWAY THE OLD ARISTOCRACY AND TRADITIONAL INSTITUTIONS WOULD LIBERATE US. To some extent it did – but it also undermined the things that nourished ordinary people: family, marriage, religion and local community. In Regime Change, Patrick Deneen examines the western tradition and argues that we must use the neglected resources of our philosophical heritage to construct a better way forward. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Burke and Disraeli, Deneen develops a postliberal alternative. This iconoclastic book challenges the easy assumptions of left and right. It is a blueprint for the radical changes we need to negotiate the paradoxes of the 21st century, while remaining alive to the wisdom of the past. 'Regime Change offers a sober assessment of where we are and a way forward that will challenge ideologues on all sides of the political maelstrom' — MARY HARRINGTON, author of Feminism Against Progress 'Articulates a vision for a populist politics that can rebuild what has been torn down' — J. D. VANCE, United States Senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy

Leseprobe

REGIME CHANGE

First published in Great Britain by Forum, an imprint of Swift Press 2023

First published in the United States of America by Penguin Random House 2023

Copyright © Patrick Deneen 2023

The right of Patrick Deneed to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Book design by Ellen Cipriano

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800753297

eISBN: 9781800753303

To my parents,

Richard and Irene,

und für meine Schwiegereltern,

Rudolf und Doris—

in gratitude and with love

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART IOUR COLD CIVIL WAR

1. The End of Liberalism

2. The Power Elite

PART IICOMMON-GOOD CONSERVATISM

3. A Good That Is Common

4. The Wisdom of the People

5. The Mixed Constitution

PART IIIWHAT IS TO BE DONE?

6. Aristopopulism

7. Toward Integration

Acknowledgments

Notes

INTRODUCTION

No sensible reader of the news could look at America and think it is flourishing.

Massive economic inequality and the breakdown of family formation have eroded the foundations of society. Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of “deaths of despair,” widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair. The older generation has betrayed the younger by saddling it with unconscionable levels of debt.

Warnings about both oligarchy and mob rule appear daily on the front pages of newspapers throughout the country, as well as throughout the West. A growing chorus of voices reflects on the likelihood and even desirability of civil war, while others openly call for the imposition of raw power by one class to suppress the political ambitions of its opponent class. Unsurprisingly, the louder the calls for tyranny, the more likely the eruption of a civil war; and the more likely a civil war moves from cold to hot, the more likely it is ultimately resolved through one or another form of tyranny.

What we are witnessing in America is a regime that is exhausted. Liberalism has not only failed, as I argued in my last book, but its dual embrace of economic and social “progress” has generated a particularly virulent form of that ancient divide that pits “the few” against “the many.”

How to reconcile “the few” and “the many” is one of the oldest questions of the Western philosophical tradition. The answer devised by authors as various as Aristotle, Cicero, Polybius, Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Alexis de Tocqueville was the idea of the “mixed regime”: a mixing of the two classes. By this telling, the aim was a kind of balance and equilibrium between the two classes, and the good political order was one that achieved a kind of stability and continuity over a long period of time and secured the “common good,” the widespread prospect for human flourishing regardless of one’s class status.

The classical solution was rejected by the architects of liberalism, who believed that this seemingly permanent political divide could be solved by advances in a “new science of politics.” Rather than seeking a “mixed regime,” instead it was believed that a regime governed by a new commitment could overcome the divide: the priority of progress. The first liberals—“classical liberals”—believed especially that economic progress through an ever-freer and more expansive market could fuel a transformative social and political order in which growing prosperity would always outstrip economic discontents. Far from seeking stability, balance, and order, the aim was the unceasing instability of an economy that has fittingly been described as a constant process of “creative destruction.” It was held as an article of faith that the inequality and resulting discontents generated by the new capitalist economic system would be compensated by a “rising tide” of prosperity.

Later liberals—“progressives”—decried the resulting economic inequality, but retained the belief that progress would eventually give rise to the reconciliation of the classes. While they called for greater economic equality, they also demanded dynamism in the social order in order to displace not now the remnants of the old aristocracy, but the instinctual conservatism of the commoners. This imperative has been especially pursued through transformations wrought in the social sphere, and has in recent years culminated in the sexual revolution and its attendant effort to displace “traditional” forms of marriage, family, and sexual identity based in nature, replaced instead by a social and technological project that would liberate humans from mere nature. Progressive liberalism has held that through the overcoming of all forms of parochial and traditional belief and practice, ancient divisions and limits could be overcome and instead be replaced by a universalized empathy. With the advance of progress, the old divisions—once based in class, but increasingly defined in the terms of sexual identity—would wither away and give rise to the birth of a new humanity.

Both liberal parties—“classical” and “progressive”—believed that progress was the means of overcoming the ancient division between the classes and instead how political peace might be realized; but both recognized and feared that such progress would, in each instance, be thwarted by the common people who would most immediately find the fruits of that progress not to be beneficial, but destabilizing, disorienting, and an affront to their beliefs, practices, and even dignity. The faith that political peace could best and only be achieved through progress required that effective control of the political order be reserved to liberal elites on both the right and the left who would secure the blessings of progress, whether economic or social.

While the two sides of liberalism opposed each other over means, at a deeper level they effectively combined to ensure the prevention of a dedicated “people’s party” that would oppose progressivism in both the economic and social domains. The liberal fear of the demos resulted in a political order that was, at its foundations, dedicated to the rule of more progressive elites over the threatening demos, and, throughout American history, has been impressively effective at preventing the rise of a genuine populist party. The ideal of “mixed regime,” or “mixed constitution” (as I will label it in these pages), was replaced by the creation of a new and entrenched progress-oriented liberal elite, one that today increasingly views the demos as a threat to its project—whether economically or socially.

During the brief Pax Americana of the post–Cold War world, the liberal West had grown accustomed to a political divide between right and left liberals, a contentious yet manageable political division in which each side of liberalism would be advanced successively in the economic and social spheres through the oscillation of electoral victories. This brief interregnum of “neo-libertarianism”—in both its “conservative” and “progressive” forms—has been shattered by the reappearance of that oldest political division—the division between the “few” and the “many.” Whether “classical” or “progressive” liberals, their inherent fear and mistrust of the demos was and remains expressed in a shared panic over the rise of populism. Strenuous efforts are today exerted to prevent a political realignment that would result in a people’s party opposed to the liberal progressive project. On the notional “right” of the liberal spectrum, extremely well-funded efforts ceaselessly attack the “authoritarianism,” anti-expert ignorance, and economic “socialism” of populism; on the progressive liberal “left,” relentless efforts paint every conservative opposition to social and sexual progressivism as racist, bigoted, and fascist. The two liberal oppositions have coalesced in the form of “Woke Capitalism,” the perfect wedding of the “progressivist” economic right and social left, a combination that aims to produce a populace that is satisfied with diversion, consumption, and hedonism, and, above all, does not disturb the blessings of progress. And, if that doesn’t work, there remains the use of levers of political and corporate power to suppress populist threats.

Yet these efforts are proving inadequate because the consequences of unfettered progress are no longer acceptable to the demos. The populist backlash around the world is simultaneously against liberalism in both its “right” and “left” forms. It rejects the economic “neoliberalism” of the post–Cold War American imperium, demanding political and economic boundaries, protection of national industries, a robust social safety net, greater worker protections, and a more muscular prevention and even dismantling of monopolistic concentrations of economic power. Equally, it pushes back against the social liberalism of progressives, opposing the self-loathing embedded in contemporary approaches to national history, combatting the sexualization of children, seeking limits on pornography, rejecting the privatization of religious belief, and even has achieved an overturning in the legal domain of the libertarianism at the heart of America’s half-century abortion regime.

In other words, the liberal “solution” now generates a worsening of the very divide that it claimed to be able to solve through the application of “progress.” While ruling elites strive to double down on an acceleration of economic and social libertarianism, the accumulating negative consequences of the resulting policies have led to the rise of populist commoners opposing both sides of liberalism. “The many” are achieving “class consciousness”—not as Marxists, but as left-economic and social-conservative populists. If the liberal “solution,” in fact, only worsens the political problem it claims to have solved, then a new approach is demanded.

With the dimming of the bright light of liberalism and its seeming historical inevitability now relegated to the dustbin of bad theories of history, both the need and the prospect for liberalism’s true and natural opponent arises: a movement that begins with, and is defined by, a rejection of the ideological pursuit of progress along with the baleful political, economic, social, and psychological costs of that pursuit. This project is one both of recovery and reinvention, plumbing our own tradition for resources capable of addressing our current political impasse, but now articulated in contemporary terms that would be at once novel as well as recognizable to such thinkers as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Tocqueville.

What is needed—and what most ordinary people instinctively seek—is stability, order, continuity, and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word for it, is a conservatism that conserves: a form of liberty no longer abstracted from our places and people, but embedded within duties and mutual obligations; formative institutions in which all can and are expected to participate as shared “social utilities”; an elite that respects and supports the basic commitments and condition of the populace; and a populace that in turn renders its ruling class responsive and responsible to protection of the common good. What is needed, in short, is regime change—the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order in which existing political forms can remain in place, as long as a fundamentally different ethos informs those institutions and the personnel who populate key offices and positions. While superficially the same political order, the replacement of rule by a progressive elite by a regime ordered to the common good through a “mixed constitution” will constitute a genuine regime change.

While the “postliberal order” will cut across current political parties, its current best hope is a “new right.” This label obscures as much as it assists, since a great deal of the economic program of the “new right” takes its cues from the older social democratic tradition of the left. However, today’s left has largely abandoned the central commitment accorded to the working class, viewing its socially conservative tendencies as a deeper threat to progress. It has become clear that the right is more willing to “move left” economically than the left is to “move right” on social issues. This tendency is more than merely accidental, but represents a return of conservatism to its original form—a consolidated opposition to liberalism. Any advance of economic equality will be accompanied by a greater effort to foster and support those institutions from which deep forms of solidarity emerge: family, community, church, and nation.

The emergence of a “postliberal” new right is, in effect, a rediscovery of early-modern forms of conservatism, and echoes conservatism’s earliest thinkers, who warned of the dangers emerging from an ideology of progress. These thinkers, in turn, reached back to the ancients to learn anew lessons about the “mixed constitution.” While ancients such as Aristotle, Polybius, and Aquinas had no word for “conservatism,” they offered its original articulation: a political and social order of balance, stability, and longevity that achieves the common good through forms of political, social, and economic “mixing.” This revival of a core teaching from the very origins of Western political thought might properly be labeled “conservative” if we understand that any undertaking to “conserve” must first more radically overthrow the liberal ideology of progress. For our purposes, I will give this alternative a label that combines its ancient and modern labels: “common-good conservatism.”

This book is an effort to offer not just another critique of liberalism, but a positive and hopeful vision of a postliberal future. In the chapters that follow, I will trace the way liberalism has not only failed, but generated a particularly virulent form of the ancient divide that pits the “few” against the “many.” I will argue that the answer lies not in the renewed application of liberal “solutions”—whether “right” or “left” liberal—but in a rediscovery and updating of the ancient tradition of the “mixed constitution,” and I will show how a common-good conservatism, which seeks to implement a “mixed constitution,” rejects the ideology of progress, repudiates a political order that is premised on elite restraint of the anti-progressive instincts of the people, and is informed by the “wisdom of the many,” is the way forward. Finally, I will suggest practical ways of “mixing” the elite and the populace.

Today’s elites must be forced to abandon their self-serving efforts in the face of overwhelming evidence that the social, economic, and political course they have pursued for the past fifty years has deeply harmed the prospects for flourishing among the working classes.

This change will not occur simply by a mythic revolutionary uprising of the many against the few. Rather, it will require some number of “class traitors” to act on behalf of the broad working class, articulating the actual motives and effects of widespread elite actions. Even if relatively small, an elite cadre skilled at directing and elevating popular resentments, combined with the political power of the many, can bolster populist political prospects as a working governmental and institutional force. In turn, a new elite can be formed, or the old elite reformed, to adopt a wider understanding of what constitutes their own good—a good that is indivisible and common—and to steer America to a state of flourishing.

1

The End of Liberalism

Liberalism has generated its own undoing. As a philosophy and practical political project, one of its main aims was to overthrow the old aristocracy, in which one’s social station and political position was secured by birthright. No matter how much one strived—or how dissolute one became—one’s social and political rank could not be changed. This immutability was true not only in regard to one’s political position, but as a consequence that much of one’s identity was the consequence of birth. Liberalism proposed to overthrow this ancien régime and put in its place an order in which people, through their striving, ability, and hard work, could create an identity and future based upon the sum of their own choices.

Several hundred years into this experiment, we have witnessed firsthand the rise of a new ruling class, a “meritocracy” that has thrived under the conditions established and advanced by liberalism. Liberalism is today in crisis, not just because of the bad behavior of the new elite, but because its rise has corresponded with the attrition of institutions that benefited the lower classes while restraining the ambitious who wished to escape its restraints. The weakening of the family, neighborhood, church and religious community, and other associations has resulted in the degradation of the social and economic conditions of “the many,” even as “the few” have garnered a monopoly both on economic and social advantages.

In the advanced liberal democracies across the world, working-class voters have risen up to reject the leaders who have regarded those who have been “left behind” with disdain and contempt. In response, liberalism has unmasked itself, revealing itself as an ideology that will force those who oppose it into submission, and advancing an increasingly “illiberal” liberalism. Efforts to limit the political power of the culturally dispossessed and economically disadvantaged—frequently by accusing majorities of being “antidemocratic”—increasingly reveal liberalism not to be a mutually shared comprehensive system that always allows self-determination, but rather a particular partisan set of commitments. The once unassailed public philosophy has been delegitimized.

As liberalism has careened toward its inevitable failure, politics across the Western world have been scrambled, no longer dividing between left and right liberals. Rather partisans who criticize the “people” (often composed of left and right liberals) and partisans who criticize the “elites” (today, most powerfully on the right, but also present on the left—for instance, Bernie Sanders and his criticisms of corporate elites) oppose each other. More than standing in opposition, they are in a vicious cycle as each side declines in virtue and strives for the destruction of the other, a cycle that will continue as long as liberalism remains the regnant regime.

To understand how the rise of liberalism resulted in this vicious cycle, it is necessary to understand how liberalism’s conception of liberty created both a new ruling class and degraded the lives of the masses.

A premodern conception of liberty—expressed in the pages of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and the confluence of the philosophical schools of Athens and the biblical theological tradition in Jerusalem—was premised upon the ideal of self-rule, self-discipline, and self-government. The institutions of family, religion, and government raised guardrails on the otherwise natural appetites and desires that, when succumbed to, resulted in what this tradition regarded as a condition of servitude or slavery. The person who surrendered to the appetites was not only a slave, but also had the soul of a tyrant—a gluttony for power that would allow the enslaved tyrant to commit any act, any crime, any awful deed. All of the citizenry, including the powerful, needed to be habituated to the virtue that accorded with freedom, and the guardrails helped with that education for liberty.

By contrast, liberalism’s architects proposed a vision of freedom as liberation from limitations imposed by birthright. To realize this liberation it was necessary not only to overthrow rule by inheritance but the older social forms that had taught and reinforced the cultivation of virtue. The realization of a new liberty required the dismantling of older institutions that had cultivated the classical ideal of liberty.

What had previously been considered as “guardrails” came instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations upon individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberal liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefining, or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts, and even the churches. In their place, a flattened world arose: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a vast and widening playground for the project of self-creation.

Today, liberalism’s dismantling of guardrails is often described as a heroic story of progress in which past injustices were overcome, ushering in an age of enlightenment, justice, liberty, and equality. Oppressed people were liberated from the unjust constraints of a dark age. Anyone questioning the narrative is accused of defending privilege and nostalgically craving to reinstitute the injustices of a benighted past.

This narrative is a classic example of “Whig history,” a self-congratulatory story told by the ruling class about its inevitable and beneficent ascent. The story told by liberals—like all “Whig history”—is self-serving to their cause, even at the cost of getting the history wrong and ignoring lessons of the past about “limiting” institutions that actually served freedom.

Consider, for instance, arguments made by one of liberalism’s heroes, John Stuart Mill. In his classic text On Liberty, Mill denounced the constraining role of tradition in favor of an open, liberal society that advantages those who seek to disrupt these kinds of formative institutions. In Mill’s parlance, custom was a “despot” over the lives of those who wished to instead engage in “experiments in living.” While it’s doubtless the case that custom appears to be a “despot” to those who seek to disrupt and overthrow long-standing traditions and customs of society, from another perspective, custom and the associated array of institutions that support and perpetuate ongoing cultural practices exist not merely to prevent the liberty of self-inventions, but to protect ordinary people from the potential rapaciousness of the ambitious. Viewed in such a light, these informal but pervasive cultural forms not only prevent efforts of a revolutionary character from reordering society around the imperative of individual liberty, but they protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people, people who are not well served by instability, generational discontinuity, institutionalized disorder—in short, what Mill calls “progress.”

Mill’s contemporary across the English Channel, Alexis de Tocqueville, precisely in this light understood the threats of liberation from ambient culture. Observing the likely rise of a more “revolutionary” class in a liberalizing America, Tocqueville wrote admiringly especially of the constraining power of religion.

But revolutionaries in America are obliged to profess openly a certain respect for the morality and equity of Christianity, which does not permit them to violate its laws easily when they are opposed to the execution of their designs. . . . Up to now, no one has been encountered in the United States who dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society. An impious maxim—one that seems to have been invented in a century of freedom to legitimate all the tyrants to come.1

Understood in light of Tocqueville’s argument, the “guardrails” that limited those of a revolutionary temperament—limits that might be understood as a benign form of “tyranny of the majority”—can be properly understood as deeply democratic. They are democratic first because they are the creation of countless generations of forebears who contributed to their creation, won through hard experience, and assembled and bolstered them through institutions in order to protect the prospects of life flourishing no matter the economic or social position of the person. Those likely to defend a preeminent role of cultural institutions implicitly recognize that there is inevitable inequality in the world, in any number of forms—whether the ongoing presence of arbitrary social differences, or their replacement by natural inequalities due to differences of talent and self-direction—and, rather than falsely claiming that all inequalities can ultimately and someday be overcome, instead insist that the governing cultural forms and norms are the best means of securing the prospects for flourishing especially of the weaker and disadvantaged. They were democratic, secondly, because the accumulation of customs and practices embedded in social structures acted as a break especially upon those of distinct ambition and even tyrannical impulse, those who would benefit especially from conditions of instability and disorder. It was for this reason that G. K. Chesterton stated his belief that “tradition is only democracy extended through time. . . . Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”2

Contra Mill, long-standing cultural institutions and practices should be given the benefit of the doubt, precisely because they largely develop from the “bottom up” in order to achieve two simultaneous ends: foster conditions of flourishing for ordinary people, while restraining the tyrannical impulses of the powerful to be free of the moderating and sustaining strictures of custom, tradition, and culture. Tocqueville stressed that the obeisance of those who are potentially revolutionaries may only be “ostensible”—that they may harbor unstated desires to break free of all restraints—but even grudging acknowledgment of cultural norms, won through social pressure from below, can be sufficient as a form of restraint. For such cultural forms to exercise widespread influence, the customs and norms must be widely shared and generally embraced by the populace.

In effect, those who ascend to positions of power, influence, and wealth are “controlled” and limited by such forms—not merely by passage of positive law or separation of powers, but by the governance of the “democracy of the dead.”

Today, the essence of elite formation consists of two main objects, irrespective of major or course of study: first, taking part in the disassembling of traditional guardrails through a self-serving redefinition of those remnants as systems of oppression; and second, learning the skills to navigate a world without any guardrails. College—especially at selective institutions—is a place and time in which one experiments in a safe atmosphere where guardrails have been removed, but safety nets have been installed. One learns how to engage in “safe sex,” recreational alcohol and drug use, transgressive identities, cultural self-loathing, how to ostensibly flaunt traditional institutions without bucking the system—all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the “culture” comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods, and not the shaping environment that governs the ambitious and settled alike. Those outside these institutions also have had the guardrails removed—all are to be equally “free”—but without safety nets in sight.

Elite opinion thus officially condemns the older cultural institutions and forms while learning a new kind of internalization of norms that function as a kind of privatized guardrail, not unlike the secured spaces of those gated communities that many in this class will eventually join. Cultures rich with norms that applied to high and low alike had been a kind of “public utility,” serving everyone in society equally, but the official messaging of elite-driven society comes to attack and dismiss many of the long-standing ideals that were encouraged by older cultural forms. Thus, for instance, media, popular culture, and the education industry come increasingly to express disapproval of the ideal of family or marriage by redescribing it as “the traditional family” or “traditional marriage.” By adding the designation “traditional,” disrepute and disapproval are signaled by elites of the liberal order, in which the merely “traditional” is most often associated with arbitrary impositions of the past that are irrational, oppressive, and constraining. Yet—as social scientists such as Charles Murray and W. Bradford Wilcox note—those who enjoy the benefits of advanced university education implicitly learn how to form families in an anti-culture without guardrails, depending especially on the benefits of privatized norms as well as greater wealth and opportunity.3 Meanwhile, the demolition of the cultural norm and ideals—both through economic and social destruction—results in the growing dissolution of family formation among the less advantaged.

A third lesson follows these two: those who succeed deserve their status; those who have been left behind have only themselves to blame. As Michael Sandel has recently argued, educational “credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice.”4 In a world increasingly arranged to guarantee financial and social success for those who have been formed by the “sacred project” of modern liberalism, those who fail to rise from the curse of being rooted “somewhere” come to be viewed as deserving their fate. The only obstacle to rising comes to be seen as a moral failure of sorts, particularly perceived as the “clinging” to outmoded beliefs and practices that those of superior pedigree had the courage and discernment to overcome. Sandel concludes that “meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism—an insidious prejudice against those who have not been to college.” The system that had come into existence to replace the arbitrary rule of aristocrats, he notes, “can become a kind of tyranny.”5

Michael Lind has aptly described this new divide as “the new class war,” and notes that what I will often describe here in these pages as the division between “elite” and “working class” rests less on differentiation of wealth than credentials and access to a foothold and success in the managerial economy. Lind rightly notes that the working class is divided—arguably not only with the blessing, but active encouragement of the managerial elite—between “old-stock natives” and “recent immigrants and their descendants.”6 Without denying the reality or seriousness of racism as a scourge in Western nations and particularly the United States, comprehensive and effective proposals to redress historic injustices would have to include considering how the demise of formative social institutions and family life have harmed the working classes, regardless of race. Such considerations are studiously avoided as part of the progressive effort to redescribe all of Western history as structurally racist, rather than structurally liberal—and, hence, damaging to the life prospects of ordinary people regardless of their race and ethnic background. Arguments that give exclusive focus upon a racial basis of the Western political divide thus end up reinforcing the advantages of the managerial classes, forestalling recognition among a multiracial working class of common interest against the managerial class, which in turn benefits from the political impotence of this divided underclass. Yet, as recent American elections have shown, a growing awareness of this common interest is leading to the gradual development of a multiracial, multiethnic working class that has potential to become a powerful counterforce to the gentry liberals who govern it from their new medieval citadels.7

Beyond a Politics of Elite Hypocrisy and Populist Resentment

As the second decade of the twenty-first century began, a new political alignment and division came to define the Western (and even global) political landscape: the elites against the people, populists against the new aristocracy. And, as could be expected, their respective partisans were legion. In the wake of this international political realignment, the partisanship has taken the form of decrying the evils of the elites or the authoritarian dangers of populism. Within these respective stances are vested extensive assumptions about the nature of virtue and vice. For the critics of elites, the vices in evidence include hypocrisy of the wealthy, tendentious policy that benefits the upper classes while harming ordinary people, and virtue signaling that shrouds the typical vices of the oligarchy. For critics of “the people,” behind their purported claims to defending a way of life lie the vices of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and assorted other bigotries. Deeply implicit in these critiques are suggestions of the associated virtues of those who critique their opponents. But rarely are such virtues actually articulated. Indeed, most of the purported virtues are simply implicit claims that their respective sides lack the vices of those they criticize.

Following the election of Trump, the passage of Brexit, and the rise of populist parties throughout Europe, scores of books have appeared either denouncing the elites or populists. Critiques of the ruling class ranged from academic studies to popular broadsides, including bestsellers such as J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) and Ship of Fools by Fox News host Tucker Carlson (2018). Books such as Carlson’s often pointed to the conditions described in more evenhanded scholarly books that explored the growing partisan divide between elites and “populists,” such as Charles Murray’s prophetic Coming Apart (2012), or the data collected by Timothy P. Carney in Alienated America (2019), both of which offered portraits of the social disintegration increasingly experienced by America’s white working class that were intended to elicit equal parts sympathy for their plight and unhappiness with the elite.

Tucker Carlson’s bestselling book, for instance, denounced the elites in a series of portraits, exposing their egalitarian hypocrisy, such as Chelsea Clinton’s unbroken succession of educational and professional successes (Harvard, Oxford, jarringly high-paying jobs) juxtaposed with her expressed commitments to egalitarian social justice. Carlson built a sustained brief against the policies that have proved disastrous to the working class while feathering the nests of the well educated, including the TARP bailouts of 2008 and the war in Iraq. Other books in this genre decry the smugness and condescension of the “Elite” toward (in the words of Kurt Schlichter) the “Normals” who just want to lead decent lives without do-gooder interference of their betters. In his book entitled Militant Normals, Schlichter writes:

What our Elite today feels is not duty to the Normals but, rather, contempt for them and a desire to break the Normals to the Elite’s will. Politically, this manifests in the Elite pursuing policies that at best ignore the needs of the Normals and, at worst, seek to punish them. . . . Culturally, this takes the form of a nonstop barrage of hatred and invective aimed at everything the Normals hold sacred.8

Books in this genre paint a portrait of a vicious and hostile elite who joyously and wantonly engineer the destruction of the working class. They are books written for one “team”: based upon denunciation of the opposition, they seek to shore up allegiance to a presumptively better team. Yet, their energy is mainly in the form of opposition and even resentment toward those claiming to be the social betters of “the Normals,” and not necessarily (indeed, exceedingly rarely) to portray an admiring portrait of the virtues of ordinary people. The genre relies mainly on denouncing an enemy rather than elevating the virtuous.

A less incendiary approach simply allows correlation to suggest the possibility of causation: as the condition of well-educated urban and near-urban denizens has dramatically improved, the condition of the more rural and less educated has declined measurably and precipitously. Without implying intention or hostility as such, Charles Murray amassed a trove of data showing how those living in “HPY bubbles (Harvard, Princeton, and Yale)” were thriving while those of lower educational attainment and increasing geographical isolation in “flyover country” were suffering from a rash of divorce, out-of-wedlock children, poor health, drug and alcohol addiction, deaths of despair, and criminality.

Similarly, Tim Carney argued that the individualist ethos of the elites has served them well while severely and negatively impacting the daily lives of the “alienated,” those who lacked the social capital to build the kinds of ties and bonds that allow the wealthy and well connected to flourish in a winner-take-all economy. Carney noted that “the story of how we got Trump is the story of the collapse of community, which is also the story behind our opioid plague, our labor-force dropouts, our retreat from marriage, and our growing inequality.”9

According to journalist David Goodhart, a comparable situation existed in Great Britain leading up to the vote in favor of Brexit. Examining the growing divide in his country, Goodhart differentiated between “Anywhere” people and “Somewhere” people. While “Anywheres” have “portable ‘achieved’ identities, based on educational and career success which makes them generally comfortable and confident with new places and people,” the “Somewheres,” Goodhart argued, “have lost economically with the decline of well-paid jobs for people without qualifications and culturally, too, with the disappearance of a distinct working-class culture and the marginalization of their views in the public conversation.”10

The decline of the working class—formerly, the mainstay of left politics—was due to its political abandonment by progressives and its subsequent neglect by the right. The election of Trump and passage of Brexit were born of a despair of being voiceless and unrepresented. The response of the mainstream of both parties was to denounce not only Trump and Brexit, but also the recidivism of those who supported both.

From the other side of the battlements, one frequently encountered denunciations of the vices of “the people.” Critiques of the moral shortcomings of ordinary people emanating from the left have been popular fodder to stoke outrage among conservatives, and yet, both progressive and right-libertarian politicians continue to serve up their views of the deficiencies of those whose votes they have written off, most often in their candid and (they believe) off-the-record moments. While speaking at a fundraiser in 2008, candidate Barack Obama reflected on the reasons for growing resentments among the working class, stating “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” While his opponent during the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, criticized then senator Obama for his “demeaning remarks” about “small-town America” as “elitist and out of touch,” just a few years later in 2016—also during a fundraiser—she famously denounced half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”—“racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”11 Such comments have not been limited to Democrats, as evinced by Mitt Romney’s infamous claim at yet another fundraiser that “47 percent of the people . . . will vote for the president [Obama] no matter what. . . . There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to heath care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”12

These infamous statements—often regarded as having helped sink the candidacies of Romney and Clinton, and nearly fatally damaged the first run of Obama—are particularly noteworthy inasmuch as they reveal the true views of those who occupy uncontested elite status in American society. In each case, these were assessments of the shortcomings of the electorate that were shared in a room filled with donors and believed to be entirely “off the record.” These statements were candid admissions that the very candidates seeking the votes of precisely these “swing voters” held them in genuine contempt and disapproval, in particular for a variety of moral shortcomings that suggest their backwardness, their superstitions, their bigotry, and an absence of virtuous self-reliance.

These charges against a resentful working class who largely deserve their diminished lot for failing to keep up with progress have not only been articulated by politicians in candid moments, but also appear in more popular press. Few have denounced “the people” as vociferously as the “Never Trumper” Kevin Williamson. In a 2016 essay denouncing conservative sentimentality (such as that of Vance, Carlson, or Schlichter) toward the sufferings of the white working class, Williamson (appealing to his own white, working-class background) argued that these thinkers were defending a group of complainers who largely had themselves to blame for their straitened circumstances. Williamson wrote that sympathy for such bad choices was simply “immoral” and argued that right-thinking people should cut loose the working class as negative assets: “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. . . . What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”13

Academics have expounded on the moral shortcomings of populists in less bombastic, but equally strenuous, condemnation. According to political scientist James Stimson, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, the resentments of the working class are simply the consequence of their unwillingness to accept the structural changes in the modern economy and move to areas of greater economic opportunity. “[Those who are economically successful are] ambitious and confident in their abilities. Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline.” Given that, Stimson said: “I don’t see them as once-proud workers, now dispossessed, but rather as people of limited ambition who might have sought better opportunity elsewhere and did not. I see their social problems more as explanations of why they didn’t seek out opportunity when they might have than as the result of lost employment.” Stimson concluded that these people should be superseded politically by the “new class.”14

Both the left and the right, whether popular or academic, have dominantly resorted to a politics of friend/enemy: the other side is so morally corrupt and so likely to institute tyranny that it must not only be defeated electorally. Rather, the other side must be outright eliminated.

Know Your Enemy

As this brief review of recent political positioning reflects, electorates are increasingly divided (at least by the social commentariat) between those who denounce “the elite” and those who condemn “the people.”

What is perhaps most striking about these stances, but rarely noted, is that these respective positions are almost entirely oppositional. They stress the vices of those they perceive themselves arrayed against (either the condescending elites or the querulous masses), rather than identifying what is superior about their own partisans. Of course, rallying partisans around an oppositional stance is common in politics. But usually such an oppositional position is accompanied by some explicit claims about the superiority of one’s own position and partisans, and at the very least, a set of implicit claims. A noteworthy feature of this newly established political divide across Western liberal democracies is an almost entire absence of any such explicit depictions of the superiority of one’s own “team,” and even, it could be argued, a lack of explicable implicit defenses. The current political realignment seems driven almost entirely by animosity toward the perceived shortcomings and even moral vices of the opposition.

Upon reflection, there is good reason for the general absence of extended reflection upon what recommends each “team”: both, in fact, extensively lack discernible virtues. Critics of “elites” are generally accurate in their depiction of a ruling class that is increasingly out of touch, who for all their apparent difference between left and right liberals, divide between those who demonstrate cultural elitism (with disdain toward the backward recidivism of flyover people) or financial elitism (with disdain toward those who have failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps). Yet, there is notable silence about the praiseworthy qualities of “the people” among those who denounce “elites.” At times it is implied that the “Normals” are less likely to be hypocrites; that they might be the source of certain homely virtues, such as commitment to home, place, family, and nation; and that they are generally disrupted in their commitments due to the depredations of “the elites.” When truth be told, however, “the people” are not generally held forth as paragons of virtue. Reams of statistics demonstrate that they are far less likely to exhibit certain kinds of virtues related to marriage, family, work, and criminality than the “elites” that they often disdain. People in the working class are far more likely to exhibit various measures of social pathology such as divorce and out-of-wedlock marriage than “the elites.” They have become susceptible to the pathologies of various addictions, ranging from marijuana and opioids to video addictions and pornography. These social indicators doubtless reflect the strains of straitened economic circumstances and diminished upward mobility. People in these classes have experienced the first decrease in the average life expectancy of any American generation, a consequence of these choices now increasingly described as “deaths of despair.”

Rather than seeking to correct these baleful tendencies through the benefits that might be more available to people in more rooted circumstances, particularly the prospects of strong civil society, by every measure, people in the working classes have abandoned their traditional affinity to associational life. Today, they are far less likely to be members of religious or social organizations. The sense of meaning and support that such institutions might once have offered even people with diminished economic prospects has been largely replaced by the attractions of consumption, whether in the form of prepackaged or social media, cheap imported products, or consciousness-altering and pain-diminishing controlled substances.

Their politics reflects their condition of despair and resentment. They are drawn to support demagogic political leaders who are implicated in corruption and marked by moral laxity, whose main attraction is their brusqueness, a willingness to say and do anything if it agitates or “trolls” the elites. In the main, attacks on the elites are driven by blame for this woeful condition and resentment for an increasing economic and social monopolization of well-being and even the trappings of virtuous behavior.

Meanwhile, those who criticize the deficiencies of “the people,” for the most part, claim to be committed egalitarians who are philosophically opposed to assertions of the moral superiority of an “elite,” per se. Rather than defend the “elites” qua elites, critics of populism tend to don what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls a “faux egalitarianism” in their modernized versions of “medieval citadels,” generally congratulating themselves on their egalitarian commitments while denouncing the bigotry of the working class.15 It is largely unthinkable for those who occupy elite status and populate ruling institutions to state explicitly the superiority of that status. The closest approximation is the implicit praise for those who have succeeded—and, more explicitly, the criticism of the “populists” whose resentments are born of their failures, such as the claims reflected in the critiques of someone like Kevin Williamson or James Stimson. Such arguments thus claim that those who support “populist” candidates and policies have chosen to be losers in the modern economy. They deserve no pity, because the fault is entirely the result of their own poor choices.

These positions come close to invoking, without necessarily making explicit, the earned moral superiority of the “elites,” marking a divide between those who have successfully navigated the demands of a fierce and competitive—but rewarding—meritocratic landscape, and those who have chosen to fail (or, by failing to engage in the competition, have failed to even attempt to succeed). Because a meritocratic system is in theory open to anyone of ability, self-discipline, and a work ethic, it invites a pervasive if often unstated form of self-congratulation among those who have successfully negotiated its demands, and, correspondingly, a subtle if rarely articulated stance of condemnatory judgment against those who have failed.16 For every Williamson or Stimson willing to make such judgments explicit, there are likely countless others who have internalized such perspectives as well as the appropriate good taste not to speak them aloud. But, because of the stated egalitarianism of modern liberal democracies, while such views might be widely thought—and who can say for certain?—they are not often admitted aloud.

It is far more likely that those who occupy high-status positions, or who enjoy the benefits of higher educational or occupational attainments—and, hence, greater access to economic and social success in an increasingly globalized economy—will condemn various expressions of populism for its inherent elitism, privilege, various bigotries such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth. A major attraction of “identity politics” for an ascendant elite class lies in claims to egalitarianism that bracket class considerations, and particularly, the status of the working class. A hallmark of the modern left has been to adopt egalitarian commitments concerning identity to the exclusion of its former commitment to class equality, leading to the precipitous decline of working-class identification with political parties and movements that once drew the support of the laboring classes. While the commitments of more highly educated and professional classes thus implicitly point to a certain moral superiority resulting from their greater commitment to ascendant forms of identity egalitarianism—what has come to be known as being “woke”—in the main, the most robust expression of “in-group” commitments arises from a shared condemnation of various bigotries, and not a robust or widespread expression of their own greater worth. Indeed, when it comes to the measures of their own social health just mentioned—marriage, health, work, and even religion—the elites tend to be silent about their worth or even denigrate the centrality of these virtuous practices in their own success. Thus, the aspects of life to which they might appeal to extol certain virtues are, in fact, widely regarded at least officially as “vices,” based upon bourgeois sexist and elitist values that the upper class enjoys amid the denial of their value.

Thus, the two main parties today are more aligned by what—or, rather, who— they are against than by what they are for. As a result, mainly through this largely oppositional stance, both “sides”—both teams—regard themselves as better than they actually are, by virtue of standing against the characteristics they denounce and deny. The mere fact that “the people” declaim hypocrisy, elitism, self-deceptive “wokeness,” and the condescension of the upper class does little to correct the manifest shortcomings that now afflict broad swaths of the working class. The assumption appears to be that if the elites were not so depraved, the people would not be suffering the many measurable social pathologies that now afflict the lower and working class. This might well be the case—to an extent at least—but such a position appears more likely to be a source of appeal for those capable of stoking resentments, without an accompanying program or prospect of their social improvement.