The Bellicose Intellectualism of the Right
Ezra Klein asks a leading conservative thinker what the “post-liberal” right really wants
In a recent interview on his podcast, Ezra Klein talked with Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Why Liberalism Failed,” which was published, to acclaim from both conservatives and some liberals, in 2018.
In his introductory remarks, Klein noted that he had invited Deneen to the show because the conservative professor seemed to have taken a radical turn since the publication of the book, advocating on a Substack blog he writes for, “The Postliberal Order,” for the right to go on the offensive against liberalism. In his view, liberalism had captured all the political power in this country and was hard at work destroying the crucial institutions that create human virtue — marriage, the family, human friendship, community, and church.
Yes, the libs are tearing apart not only friendship but the concept of virtue itself.
Everyone should read (or, better yet, listen) to the interview, and also read the essay “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberalism,” to get a clearer sense of Deneen and his political philosophy because he is one of the figures on the right who is building the intellectual foundations to justify a relentless and unsparing battle with the left, with “the enemy.” As Klein puts it, Deneen has
“moved towards embracing something more like total political war, counseling conservatives to abandon niceties like pluralism, to use the power of the state to crush their enemies, and to treat this moment at every level as a civilizational struggle.”
Likely, Deneen would have felt some satisfaction to know that both my wife and I — on a trip from St. Louis to Kansas City but stopping midway to visit the graves of my paternal grandparents in the small town of Glasgow, Mo. — were listening intently to the discussion and cringing and looking in confusion at each other often. We two political liberals/progressives were on our way to witness a friend become confirmed as a nun. Earlier, we had stopped in Columbia and visited the memorial of a beloved theater professor. I had reached out to friends along the way to see if we could somehow still safely see them, even in the face of the ongoing pandemic. (Yeah, I know, all of this is so perfect that it can’t be true, right?)
Deneen is careful to note that liberalism includes elites on the right — the classical liberalism of many older conservatives who are devoted to the free market concept and minimal government, who he essentially treats as weak and complicit RINOs. But that distinction likely will not register with those listening to his arguments, which are mostly made against the left, social or modern liberals, who support needed government intervention in the economy and in bolstering positive individual rights, and specifically against progressives. (In making his argument in the essay, Deneen at one point weirdly invokes the name of Rodney King, but is it an attempt at humor or a dog whistle? Both?)
So, listen closely to his arguments, and note how Klein, as always, deftly steers the conversation, drawing Deneen out on his views and, importantly, what he would do with power.
Repeatedly, as Deneen focuses on how progressives are “winning” on so-called culture war issues (like redefining human sexuality from the views of, say, Christian fundamentalists), Klein points out that the left doesn’t much feel like it is winning on issues like abortion rights, campaign finance reform, universal health insurance, and climate change, where, in fact, he sees “a deep feeling of continuous disappointment and unfulfilled expectation.”
One topic is worth highlighting here because it encapsulates the purposely convoluted “religious liberty” thinking being pushed by Deneen and others of what he at one point calls the “contemporary, new conservatives” (a term that feels like an oxymoron). And that is about encouraging young people who have gone off to college to get good degrees to come back to their rural roots or their hometowns to make them better places to live. It’s an idea that sounds wonderful, until you think about it for a moment and what it would mean for those young people.
This discussion encompasses nearly all the aspects of American life that Deneen blames liberals for being hostile to and, somehow, ruining: marriage, the family, community, friendship, church. And what it exposes is that conservatives want, essentially, to have young educated people come home, with the knowledge and skills they have gained at university, to serve their smaller communities and help them thrive while also (we are forced to imagine) countenancing bigotry and intellectual intolerance based on some warped notion of “religious liberty” or “parental rights.”
You know, that old How are you going keep them down on the farm when they believe women should control their own bodies and destinies and are in favor of LGBTQ+ rights and also want to live near a good art museum, some theaters, and a good coffeehouse? sort of thing.
In other words, ignore the fact that most young people not only flee (yes, flee) rural areas and small towns to seek more economic and cultural opportunities, they do so to find an environment in which there is more social acceptance for the views they hold — up to that point, likely secretly — and for, well, their very being.
I think nearly everyone would agree with the idea that it would be great if young people would return to the places where they were raised, to start families and serve on PTA and school boards and maybe the town council, and stay for some years to “give back.” But what would they do for a living to utilize and further develop what they learned in school?
And how welcomed home would they really be?
Deneen never says how he would accomplish this feat, but that doesn’t matter a whit, because it is the complaint, the grievance (and, crucially, the setting of blame on progressives, I suppose, for luring those kids away with those fancy universities and lively cities) that matters, not any solution to what are really complex issues, as Klein keeps pointing out. To the authoritarian mind, the “politics of eternity” are what resonates. As Timothy Snyder writes in his “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,”
“In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures.”
And that is the very point of the culture wars pushed by the right: to keep everyone distracted from the real problems we face as citizens and as human beings on a planet growing smaller every day. (And Deneen really wants his fellow “post-liberals” to subscribe to the Substack blog, so amping up some rather old ideas and promising more seems in order.)
In his ruminations about bringing kids back home, Deneen alludes to the character George Bailey, from the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” who stayed in Bedford Falls and not only made the lives of many of its citizens better but also saved the town itself from an unsavory future.
But Deneen glosses over the fact that George Bailey is desperate to leave town and see the world and is kept from doing so by strong familial ties and urgent circumstances. And the character in the movie merely had to deal with a rapacious banker, Mr. Potter, not with intolerant Christians who wanted to enforce their views of morality on the Bailey family.
Seduced as he is, in this case, by a doubly mythicized past, Deneen also seems to forget that the Bailey family’s building and loan represents the socially liberal politics of FDR’s The New Deal, advocating for the rights of the working and middle classes. The banker’s leadership sans Bailey would lead the charming town to morph into a mecca of vice, where a policeman wouldn’t hesitate to draw his gun and shoot on a crowded street. Perhaps Deneen comprehends that he has all of that backward in terms of his alliance with today’s right, but trusts his audience will not care to think it through. (But it is a useful thing for voters to imagine Pottersville if the ever-grifting Trump family comes back to power.)
And, just to stick to the movie for another moment, for all his talk of morality, one wonders how Deneen would react if some big idea from the progressive side were to accidentally fall into his lap. Well, as Deneen admits up front, he was inspired to “borrow” the key phrase in the title of his essay from a pugnacious brief blog post by Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar Mark Tushnet, published in May 2016, called “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.” (To be fair, Tushnet, in spelling out what he thought the Supreme Court should do after the anticipated victory of Hillary Clinton, talked of the Republicans as “losers” of the culture wars and alluded to war scenarios. So, there’s that bit of unhelpful baiting.)
It is difficult not to see much of what Deneen blames liberalism for also as a sort of borrowing, as psychological projection. Time and again, as Deneen blames liberals for hating on “institutions” like families or “enriching” friendship (as if friendship somehow needs that modifier to clarify its meaning), Klein notes that he doesn’t know anyone who feels that way. (In the car, my wife and I were saying the same thing.) At one point, when the Notre Dame professor blames the left “elite” for leaving the working class behind, Klein calmly refutes the point, providing clear examples of how the right has systematically stopped nearly all Democratic legislation intended to help the poor and the working class. (Rick Scott’s 11-point plan for America actually calls for increasing taxes on the working class, so they “have some skin in the game,” whatever that means.)
One must also question the (borrowed) title, this supposed defensive crouch on the right. What seems much more in keeping with a view of reality is that the right has been on the offensive and utilizing terms of warfare in regard to their political opposition to the left at least since the days of Newt Gingrich, when the speaker of the house invited Rush Limbaugh to train the incoming class of House members to call their political opponents “the enemy” and to never compromise, which is the very definition of politics.
Listen to the thinking of the right, of one of these contemporary, new conservatives. Deneen stumbles here and there and is at times not as articulate as one might expect of a professor, but, to be fair, it is not easy to think on your feet in an interview, he’s obviously trying to play nice. Klein came well versed in Deneen’s writing and was happy to quote from it. It is worth saying that it is difficult to be convincing — especially in person, when someone is genuinely confused by your arguments — when those arguments are based on a bad-faith, counterfactual premise about liberals being hostile to marriage, the family, friendship, virtue, and the needs of the working class.
