Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Jonah Goldberg on Patrick Deneen

The truth is that the whole point of the book is much more modest—and underwhelming—than the title and revolutionary-cosplay chapter titles suggest. Whereas, according to political theory, “regime change” means the wholesale replacement of a system of government, usually by force, Deneen’s Regime Change boils down to the idea that we need to replace the existing elites, specifically on the right, with a “New Right” of people who think like Patrick Deneen. Still, there is a tiny threat to the actual regime in his mission statement: “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” [italics mine]. In other words, so long as my team is in charge, we can keep the Constitution and all that stuff. I’d find this more worrying if I thought this tiny cadre of reactionary malcontents could get a post-liberal integralist elected dogcatcher.

Regardless, given that today’s New Right is, by my rough count, at least the fifth self-declared New Right since World War II, I find such highfalutin tough talk less worrisome—and less impressive—than the integralists might think. This is a very old story about a very old strategy. A cranky faction of the right decides it has that special gnosis and that they are the only legitimate standard bearers for their side. They denounce the (alleged) holders of power and influence as fakers, RINOs, closet progressives, Me-too Republicans, sell-outs, squishes, wets, and so on in order to claim that history must make room for the new priests of the True Faith. Often, the mainstream media will hype the New Right insurgents to use it as a cudgel against the establishment right they already despise. Not knowing that this attention is purely instrumental and short-lived, these rebels become all the more convinced they have History on their side.

The intellectual history of the right—and left—is replete with such efforts. The orthodoxies and heresies change (somewhat) almost every decade, as do the terms for them. People are declaring Libertarian Moments and Neoconservative Moments and Nationalist Moments all the time. It’s moments all the way down.

Stripped of its disquisitions on Aristotle and Aquinas and oddly envious or trollish allusions to various leftist radicals (one chapter borrows its title from Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and another from C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite), Regime Change looks more like just another moment where one faction leaps at an opportunity to get to the top of the greasy pole.

-- Jonah Goldberg, Patrick Deneen’s Otherworldly Regime, by Jonah Goldberg. Religion & Liberty Vol. 33, No. 3. A review of Patrick Deneen's Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future Sentinel (June 6, 2023).

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

"The Fallacies of the Common Good", by Kim R. Holmes (New Criterion)

The fallacies of the common good, by Kim R. Holmes. The New Criterion January 2022:
Anyone observing the evolution of conservative thought over the past few years could not have escaped a growing trend. Politicians, intellectuals, and think-tankers are questioning traditional American conservatism’s commitment to limited government, individual natural rights, and economic freedom. They are talking up the virtues of the common good in ways that call into question their commitments to liberty and freedom.

The philosophical questioning of the principles of the American founding is coming from two different factions within the Right. One involves the national conservatives. The other is from philosophers who wish to resurrect the moral organizing principles of natural law. Both reject the idea of “intrinsic” rights that is traditionally associated with the founding.

The fact that these critiques arise from the American Right is significant. American progressivism has long questioned the founding and tried to revise it to suit its purposes. Now it appears members of the Right are doing the same thing. Why? And what are the implications, not only for conservatism but for the American nation?

Respondents

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Related

Friday, May 31, 2019

Sohrab Amari, "Against David French-ism"

Against David-Frenchism, by Sohrab Amari. First Things 05/29/19:
In March, First Things published a manifesto of sorts signed by several mostly youngish, mostly Roman Catholic writers, who argued that “there is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016,” that “any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right.”

Against whom, concretely speaking, was this declaration directed?

I don’t claim to speak for the other signatories. But as one of the principal drafters, I have given the question a great deal of thought, both before and since the document’s publication. And I can now say that for me, “Against the Dead Consensus” drew a line of demarcation with what I call David French-ism, after the National Review writer and Never-Trump stalwart.

Further Discussion

  • Response What Sohrab Ahmari Gets Wrong, by David French. National Review 05/30/19:
    What is singularly curious about this, and Ahmari’s essay on the whole, is the extent to which it depends on the creation of two fictional people: a fictional David French far weaker than I think I’ve shown myself to be over many years of fighting for conservative causes, and a fictional version of Donald Trump as an avatar of a philosophy that Trump wouldn’t recognize. It is within the framework of these two fictional people that my approach is allegedly doomed to fail and Trump’s approach has a chance to prevail. ...
  • David French and the Revolutionary Style in Conservative Journalism, by Jake Meador. Mere Orthodoxy 07/03/19:
    just as in 2016, when fearful and reactionary conservatives told us to give our support to a man whose life represented the wholesale rejection of divine love, we must be willing to accept a loss of power before we would countenance cynical, consequentialist lines of thought meant to justify some greater good. When our methods of resistance become intelligible to our opponents we have left the path of fidelity. If First Things is going to resist liberalism through laughable misrepresentations of Trump and an increasingly cozy posture to some genuinely scary trends on the American right, then leaving the path of fidelity is precisely what they will end up doing.

    “What, then, of political power?” you might ask. Does not the above represent little more than yet another twist on Anabaptist style quietism, a refusal to get one’s hands dirty in the necessary and inevitably messy work of politics?

    It does not. Rather, it recognizes that a genuinely Christian political witness is not merely about a certain political content in our ideas, but a particular mode of existing as political beings. To become intelligible to those whose only political standard is the acquisition of power is to give up any political good other than power. It is, then, to give up our quiet confidence that God is at work in the world and that his work will not be advanced by those of us who would eat the king’s food and bow to his idols.

  • David French Is Right: Classical Liberalism Is the Best Framework for Protecting Religious Freedom, by Robby Soave. Reason 05/31/19. "In which First Things throws a temper tantrum."
  • The High Church of the Low Blow: Sohrab Ahmari embraces Trump’s sucker punch politics, by Bret Stephens. New York Times 05/31/19.
  • Sohrab Ahmari Vs. David French, by Rod Dreher. The American Conservative 05/31/19:
    I don’t have Ahmari’s faith in smashmouth right-wing politics of the Trumpian sort. David French’s fundamental decency as a man and as a Christian is not a fault, but a feature. I don’t get why his decency and honor is a liability. If we lose that for the sake of winning political battles, are we not at grave risk of having sold our souls?
  • David French and Sohrab Ahmari: What Are We Debating?, by Ramesh Ponnuru. National Review 05/31/19.
  • ‘David French–ism’ without David French, by J.J. McCullough. National Review 05/31/19. "French has been unfairly caricatured — but the caricature is worth defending."

Friday, September 21, 2018

Thomas G. West: "The Political Theory of the American Founding"

The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom
by Thomas G. West
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 3, 2017). 428 pp.

This book provides a complete overview of the American Founders' political theory, covering natural rights, natural law, state of nature, social compact, consent, and the policy implications of these ideas. The book is intended as a response to the current scholarly consensus, which holds that the Founders' political thought is best understood as an amalgam of liberalism, republicanism, and perhaps other traditions. West argues that, on the contrary, the foundational documents overwhelmingly point to natural rights as the lens through which all politics is understood. The book explores in depth how the Founders' supposedly republican policies on citizen character formation do not contradict but instead complement their liberal policies on property and economics. Additionally, the book shows how the Founders' embraced other traditions in their politics, such as common law and Protestantism.

Reviews and Discussion

  • Founding philosophy, by Michael Anton. [Review]. The New Criterion June 2018:
    West sets for himself the seemingly modest task of “explaining” the American founders’ political views—first, their political theory per se, and second, how they applied that theory to the practical task of building a new government. The qualifier is necessary because while we think we understand the founding, West shows that we—especially, all too often, those who’ve been specifically trained to explain it to others—do not.
  • A Partial Vindication of Thomas West, by James Stoner. Law and Liberty 12/11/17.
  • The Founders in Full, by Vincent Phillip Munoz. Claremont Review of Books 10/19/17:
    By reintroducing the moral underpinnings of the founders’ natural rights republic, Thomas West has made an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of American political thought. He shows that the founders’ republicanism is a part of their liberalism; that duties and rights, properly understood, are not at odds. In doing so, The Political Theory of the American Founding not only helps us better understand America’s principles, it explains why we ought to cherish them and fight to restore them to their rightful place in our political life.
  • Roundtable on The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West. Hillsdale College. 09/19/17. [Video]
  • Making Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature by Justin Dyer. Public Discourse> 06/09/17.
    [West argues] that the founders did in fact share a “theoretically coherent understanding” of politics rooted in natural rights philosophy. Other traditions were of course present, but the founders, West insists, embraced these other traditions in their official public documents and pronouncements only to the extent that those traditions could be enlisted as allies of the natural rights philosophy. When natural rights conflicted with elements of the common law, customary practices, or religious tradition, it was the natural rights tradition that won the day. Public documents and the affairs of state—rather than sermons, commentaries, private letters, or other musings—“point to natural rights and the laws of nature as the lens through which politics is understood.”[...]

    The Political Theory of the American Founding does a wonderful job of correcting some of the caricatures of the political thought of eighteenth-century Americans as amoral, areligious, individualistic, or otherwise hostile to public virtue and the moral conditions of freedom. The key, for West, is recognizing that the founders distinguished the purpose of politics (securing rights) from the purpose of life (happiness), and the founders created a society that remained open to the private pursuit of nobility, wisdom, piety, and the higher goods that were supposedly sublimated by the founders into the base pursuit of material gain.

    Throughout, West leaves open the question whether the founders’ philosophy is true. I venture a preliminary answer: yes, for the most part, but only because they were buoyed by those other traditions—notably Christianity, the common law, and elements of classical theological natural law—and thereby built better than they knew.

Friday, August 24, 2018

Debating Integralism

  • In Defence of Catholic Integralism, by Thomas Pink. The Public Discourse 08/12/18. "States that do not recognize both natural law and the transformation of law and public reason brought about by the raising of religion to a supernatural good will become confessors of false belief opposed to Christianity, and their great power will turn from supporting Christianity to opposing or even repressing it, especially in relation to its moral teaching."
  • Integralism and Catholic Doctrine, by Robert T. Miller. The Public Discourse 07/15/18. Catholics today are not required to believe in a Catholic confessional state. If anything, they are required to believe that everyone has a right under the natural law to religious freedom, that the state has no authority in religious matters, and that coercion of religious activity by the state is morally wrong. In short, integralism is contrary to Catholic doctrine.
  • Can States "Confess" Religious Belief? Should They?, by Christopher O. Tollefsen. 06/05/18. The confessing state exceeds the limits of its authority, either by acting to no good effect, or by acting contrary to good effect. Thus, the confessing state seems inappropriate as a matter not simply of prudence, but of principle.
  • The Catholic Church, the State, and Liberalism, by Joseph G. Trabbic. The Public Discourse 05/02/18. "According to previous papal teaching, a Catholic confessional state is the ideal, even if in most modern situations it’s not a practical possibility, and prudence would steer us away from it. That teaching continues to be normative for Catholics."

Monday, February 19, 2018

Richard M. Reinsch II: "Full-Spectrum Reason"

It is in this intellectual-moral-cultural space that the autonomous liberal individualism and the “naked reason,” which are what Deneen is most concerned with, is able to do its damaging work. But as Nathan Schlueter insightfully noted in an essay comparing the thought of Pope Benedict and Leo Strauss, for all of the former’s criticisms of the modern undermining of human reason, and with it our ability to access the metaphysical depth of the human condition, Pope Benedict never turned his back on liberalism or the Enlightenment tout court. There is no "putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age," whose "positive aspects . . . are to be acknowledged unreservedly."

Pope Benedict sought to engage liberalism with a record of Western achievement rooted in the Socratic dialogues of classical philosophy and in the analogy of being found in medieval philosophy, whose import is to show the complex but real connection between the soul of the person and the personal God of the biblical tradition. Liberalism is, ultimately, an attempt to limit power and to bind its necessary use with a promise of fidelity to a fundamental document, a set of claims, a constitution that forms and animates political life. Liberalism protects the relational human person — who has economic, familial, political, and religious dimensions to his being — from rationalist ideology or the claims of sheer bigotry.

This relational person who is open to the full truth of what it means to be a human person is the being that liberalism at its best is designed to protect and to nurture. However, liberalism is also an inheritance, one that incorporates the best achievements in the full record of Western theological, philosophical, political, and legal excellences. We must always engage liberalism with "the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur," as Pope Benedict reminded us at Regensburg. We should have gratitude, respect, and piety for our liberal democratic traditions and shore these up where they are faltering rather than pine for a premodern past. The clock for liberalism did not begin with Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Justice Anthony Kennedy will not tell its final story. But to ensure that will be the task of those fully engaged with the Western corpus of philosophy, theology, law, politics and the living tradition that holds this together and provides for new applications.

Richard M. Reinsch II, In Defense of Full-Spectrum Liberalism 02/19/18.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Patrick J. Deneen: "Why Liberalism Failed"

"Why Liberalism Failed"
by Patrick J. Deneen
Yale University Press (January 2018).
Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

Reviews and Related Articles

Monday, October 30, 2017

"Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents" by Patrick J. Deneen

Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents (Dissident American Thought Today)
by Patrick J. Deneen.

St. Augustines Press; 1 edition (November 30, 2016)
"Opinions about America have taken a decisive turn in the early part of the 21st century. Some 70% of Americans believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction, and half the country thinks that its best days are behind it. Most believe that their children will be less prosperous and have fewer opportunities than previous generations. Evident to all is that the political system is broken and social fabric is fraying, particularly as a growing gap between wealthy haves and left-behind have-nots increases, a hostile divide widens between faithful and secular, and deep disagreement persists over America's role in the world. Wealthy Americans continue to build gated enclaves in and around select cities where they congregate, while growing numbers of Christians compare our times to those of the late Roman empire, and ponder a fundamental withdrawal from wider American society into updated forms of Benedictine monastic communities. The signs of the times suggest that much is wrong with America. This collection of thematic essays by Notre Dame political theorist and public intellectual Patrick Deneen addresses the questions, is there something worth conserving in America, and if so, is America capable of conservation? Can a nation founded in a revolutionary moment that led to the founding of the first liberal nation be thought capable of sustaining and passing on virtues and practices that ennoble? Or is America inherently a nation that idolizes the new over the old, license over ordered liberty, and hedonism over self-rule? Can America conserve what is worth keeping for it to remain--or even become--a Republic?"

Extended Debate: Robert R. Reilly and Patrick Deneen

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Reviews and Related Discussions

Monday, August 21, 2017

Mark Lilla's "The Once and Future Liberal"

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics

by Mark Lilla.

Harper (August 15, 2017). 160 pages.
In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla offers an impassioned, tough-minded, and stinging look at the failure of American liberalism over the past two generations. Although there have been Democrats in the White House, and some notable policy achievements, for nearly 40 years the vision that Ronald Reagan offered—small government, lower taxes, and self-reliant individualism—has remained the country’s dominant political ideology. And the Democratic Party has offered no convincing competing vision in response.

Instead, as Lilla argues, American liberalism fell under the spell of identity politics, with disastrous consequences. Driven originally by a sincere desire to protect the most vulnerable Americans, the left has now unwittingly balkanized the electorate, encouraged self-absorption rather than solidarity, and invested its energies in social movements rather than in party politics.

With dire consequences. Lilla goes on to show how the left’s identity-focused individualism insidiously conspired with the amoral economic individualism of the Reaganite right to shape an electorate with little sense of a shared future and near-contempt for the idea of the common good. In the contest for the American imagination, liberals have abdicated.

Now they have an opportunity to reset. The left is motivated, and the Republican Party, led by an unpredictable demagogue, is in ideological disarray. To seize this opportunity, Lilla insists, liberals must concentrate their efforts on recapturing our institutions by winning elections. The time for hectoring is over. It is time to reach out and start persuading people from every walk of life and in every region of the country that liberals will stand up for them. We must appeal to – but also help to rebuild – a sense of common feeling among Americans, and a sense of duty to each other.

A fiercely-argued, no-nonsense book, enlivened by Lilla’s acerbic wit and erudition, The Once and Future Liberal is essential reading for our momentous times.

Reviews and Discussion







Friday, February 17, 2017

Michael Novak 1933-2017, Requiescat in pace

From his daughter, Jana Novak:

As many of you may have heard by now, dad aka Michael Novak, died peacefully early this morning from complications from colon cancer, at his apartment in DC surrounded by family.

Before he died ... Michael Novak was heard to say, repeatedly, to everyone who came to say goodbye, "God loves you and you must love one another, that is all that matters." - Robert Royal

Reflections on Novak’s passing

[This post will be continually updated in the weeks to come]