Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future

by Patrick J. Deneen

From Notre Dame professor and author of Why Liberalism Failed comes a provocative call for replacing the tyranny of the self-serving liberal elite with conservative leaders aligned with the interests of the working class

Classical liberalism promised to overthrow the old aristocracy, creating an order in which individuals could create their own identities and futures. To some extent it did—but it has also demolished the traditions and institutions that nourished ordinary people and created a new and exploitative ruling class. This class’s economic libertarianism, progressive values, and technocratic commitments have led them to rule for the benefit of the “few” at the expense of the “many,” precipitating our current political crises.

In Regime Change , Patrick Deneen proposes a bold plan for replacing the liberal elite and the ideology that created and empowered them. Grass-roots populist efforts to destroy the ruling class altogether are naive; what’s needed is the strategic formation of a new elite devoted to a “pre-postmodern conservatism” and aligned with the interest of the “many.” Their top-down efforts to form a new governing philosophy, ethos, and class could transform our broken regime from one that serves only the so-called meritocrats.

Drawing on the oldest lessons of the western tradition but recognizing the changed conditions that arise in liberal modernity, Deneen offers a roadmap for these changes, offering hope for progress after “progress” and liberty after liberalism.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Political Science, Cultural, Economics

288 pages, Hardcover

Published June 6, 2023

About the author

Patrick J. Deneen holds a B.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University. From 1995-1997 he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency. From 1997-2005 he was Assistant Professor of Government at Princeton University. From 2005-2012 he was Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, before joining the faculty of Notre Dame in Fall 2012. He is the author and editor of several books and numerous articles and reviews and has delivered invited lectures around the country and several foreign nations.

Deneen was awarded the A.P.S.A.'s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995, and an honorable mention for the A.P.S.A.'s Best First Book Award in 2000. He has been awarded research fellowships from Princeton University and the Earhart Foundation.

His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics.

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Patrick Deneen is a weird dude. I read his book because it aligns with the research I do and a podcast I launched to look at virtues and moral narratives, and how we may create the conditions to articulate new moral narratives that meet the needs and desires of our current time. Deneen and I agree that the Enlightenment project and Liberalism are failed projects. We believe that the root of our malaise in late modernity is the hyper-atomization of our society and the rise of extreme individual-ISM, which has torn the fabric of our society. There's no way we can begin to have a chance at long-term survival unless we can solve this social problem. No amount of technology will save us from this current predicament.

Why is Deneen weird? Well, first off, his book is ostensibly written for the 'working' class, for those who didn't go to college, or maybe those who did go to college but are 'fallen professionals' - those who opted out of the laptop class (his term). This book is supposedly not written for the elites, which include you and me. Wait, are you surprised to learn that you're an elite?! Welcome to the world of Patrick Deneen, where if you make $60,000 a year at a menial job, but have a 4-year degree, live in a city (he uses some laughable pejorative for cities I can't find in my notes, but it's cringy), you're an elite. He reserves the word "oligarchs" for the super-ruling elite. Many times you need to slow down and realize that as he portrays elites as having some sort of remote-special life, he's actually just talking mostly about normies who happen to live in a city and have a degree.

Also, he misreads John Dewey, which I think is intentional given that Deneen has a PhD in political science and teaches political science at Notre Dame. It would be incredibly embarrassing if Deneen at this stage of his career has so laughably misread such a pivotal figure. For example, he cites Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, a book I did a 7-podcast series on and am very familiar with. Deneen claims that Dewey is arguing for a rapid increase in the speed of modern life, and handing over the reins of governance to a meritocratic elite educated class, which is actually the exact opposite of what Dewey says in that book. Dewey says because modernity is speeding up, and the complexities of modern life as so fast and interconnected, our responsibility to our fellow citizen, the public, is to work intentionally (he uses the word intelligently) to build the governance system in which we can elect those to office who understand the consequences of our actions, and who we can hold accountable so that we are able to live a life that is free, but that is also responsible for our actions. He calls this ‘intelligence’ which means a system in which we intelligently comprehend how our actions affect those in our immediate community and those far away that we cannot possibly comprehend. Deneen states in the last two chapters how we are responsible to each other, and that is literally the Deweyan project. Our responsibility to the public, and how the logics of Liberalism are antithetical to that duty. Deneen, how could you be so disrespectful to Dewey?! For shame.

Also, his book is essentially a socialist manifesto. In the beginning of the book, Deneen highlights the times when life was really good or as good as it got in America, and every single one of those times is when socialists in America had the upper hand, including after WWII from 1946-1973 when the United States instituted price controls, had a top marginal tax rate of 92%, and very strong labor unions. There's one paragraph in the first half of the book that could have been written by Marx.

Part III - chapter 6 and chapter 7 are the only two chapters worth reading. In them, he argues for a future that I actually agree with up to a certain point. I'm 80% on team Deneen, then he gets into the whole thing that you know, gay people should not have equal rights as straight people. Weird dude. But anyways, where he's right is on his focus on mixed-integration of the classes. He proposes that everyone, elites, working class, and oligarchs all have to serve at least 1 year in mandatory military service (I believe this will transformative effects on our society, which is why we do not do this), he believes we need to pull out of the global economy and focus on localism – SIGN ME THE EFF UP! THIS IS STRAIGHT UP SOCIALIST COMMUNITY WEALTH BUILDING BABY, AND I AM ON BOARD 100%!

Deneen says college should be as close to free as possible and if you get a degree, that instead of going to Wall Street or maybe Google/Amazon, you go and work in your local town and work a job that helps people, rather than appropriating from them, you should have your college loans paid off – SIGN ME UP, COMRADE DENEEN! He says we need to focus more on family structures and less on hyper-individualization and create an economy that enables people to start families and slow down. Again, sign me up. I didn't start a family until my 40s but I wanted to start one sooner, but because of the world he describes and we live in, it was almost impossible to start a family when I really wanted to. If you don’t want a family, fine with me man, but creating the conditions to enable families to form, I am in favor (where Deneen goes off the rails is saying what counts as a family, dude spends 100 pages calling elites (you and me) authoritarian then he wants to dictate what counts as a family, weird dude, like I said). However part of my podcast focus – Reviving Virtue- is looking at the possibility of creating spaces for some form of spirituality to be explored, rather than just traditional religion, because in my older age, I am beginning to realize just how important this space is for articulating a shared vision of the good life, and how that can weave a thread through society to collectively guide our actions in greater harmony. But my vision is expansive rather than an exclusive version that Deneen articulates in the book.

Anyways, he also says Reagan and Thatcher were terrible - Deneen throwing shade on the OG Neoliberals, what next, will Deneen be opening the next Bernie Sanders rally?! He also trashes Trump, and the majority of the Republican party, which is why the book is weird, because he does all this trash talk in language that only someone with an elite education who can read a couple grades ABOVE a New Yorker article can comprehend. Which makes me think he's not really writing for the working class. Dude is weird.

Anywho, Deneen is right about this, Liberalism has failed, the Enlightenment project is a failure, and what we need more than anything else is to SLOW DOWN and build the spaces necessary to articulate a new shared vision of the good life. This can only be done in a post-Neoliberal economic order. Where Deneen fails in this book is to articulate how to break out of this Neoliberal order. As I see it, he left this out of the book because there are only two scenarios where that happens. A civil war, or a global war where a large portion of the global population is sacrificed for this new regime. Well I will say to Deneen’s defense his last 2 chapters - Aristopoulism and Toward Integration - are his answer, but it isn’t really it's just some ideas, not a blueprint for action.

If Deneen or anyone has option 3, which is a way to disembed us from the ever-increasing pace of modernity driven by the logics of Neoliberalism without massive societal disruption on a scale that would make the horrors of WWII look like a children's bedtime story, then please, we are all ears.

Until then, this book by Deneen is just trolling for $$$ so he can live his privileged lifestyle in the last few good decades we have left.

[Laura Hoffman · Rating 1 out of 5]

A plea to turn this country into an autocratic theocracy for the “common good”. Use caution when bringing into a house with pets, as the dog whistles are sure to distress them.

[Mollie Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you read only one political book this year, make it this one. I learned so much about the origins of liberalism and how classical (neo-cons, "conservatives") and progressive liberals and Marxists are 2, nay 3, sides of the same coin. Reading it has given me some tools to help me better articulate the unusual nature of my political and social views as compared to most of my family and friends. The problems in our country and the world I identified a long time ago--now I have a good understanding of why I have had such a hard time going along with "the program." Would love to discuss with any Goodreads friends who would like to read it.

[Russell Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book, in the sense that it is well-written, well-argued, and thoughtful in its treatment of things that deserve a lot of thought. But its conclusions are dangerous ones, which advance a flawed and deeply anti-egalitarian notion of "democracy," and as such deserve to be pushed back against firmly, as I do in my long review here. Read and enjoy.

[Collin Gortner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I certainly didn’t agree with everything, this is a thought-provoking book. A lot of interesting references to political philosophy. Helpful framing devices for thinking about our politics.

[Lisa Carver · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had no choice but to put 5 stars. That isn't to say that I liked the book, but the caption next to 5 star says "It was amazing" and "Regime Change" was definitely that.

I personally thought Deneen's book, "Why Liberalism Failed" was circular, unfocused, and pedantic. I only read this book because "Why Liberalism Failed" had been a favorite of a close friend and mentor and I knew he would want to talk about this new one the next time we chat. But it is a barn burner, sharp as a knife, revolutionary, and to be honest personally indicting.

Deneen divides the current political spectrum into the haves and the have nots. Which isn't really that revolutionary but he's drawing the line in a way that seems very fresh. He argues clearly that the haves aren't necessarily wealthy. They're flexible. They can handle change by adapting quickly. They can perform complex administrative tasks. And they have jobs that aren't tied to a specific geological community. He variously refers to them as "anywhere people" and "the laptop class". But whatever the designation they are the "elites" that are the boogeymen of the true conservatives.

Deneen has taken the time to understand the commonality that exists between the political parties in the United States. Post World War II there were no conservatives in American politics, conservatives for more than a century had defended the sensibility of monarchism and aristocracy from the increasingly shiny looking American Democracy that they didn't believe would pan out. Instead for a few decades the poles in American politics were between the libertarian liberals who want liberation from regulation. And progressive liberals who believe in the improvement of society through evolutionary change. Both opposed the true conservative notion of regressing to feudalism, theocracy, and dictatorship.

The book is almost two in one. The first half is a real barn burner of full throated revolutionary fervor and red meat for the overthrow of the elites, globalists, and digital nomads. The second half of the book is a series of proposals to take away the power from the disconnected elite and to give power to a new elite that Deneen reassures us will not be selected based on merit, skills, and certainly not their ability to create revolutionary products and services. Who exactly Deneen means to include in the new elite, and how they will avoid the same resentment as the current elite is vague and probably a little Polly Anna.

It's one hell of a read, I highly recommend reading it. I like at least one of his proposals a lot, the one of expanding the U.S. House to move it away from big money and back to more retail, handshaking politics. That is a regime that should be changed put in place by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. I wish he would have added a move away from "plea bargains" and back to the Jury that the Constitution so highly valued. It was the mechanism to ensure that common people were actively involved in law championed by the founders. Including the power to nullify bad law.

I think the book makes more sense if you've read Karl Popper, "The Open Society and it's Enemies" and Gustav Von Bon's "The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind". Two different perspectives wrestling with the same political locus.

What I fault him for is playing to the angry crowd or being too simple to not simply fall into it. We are going forward through time. The shape of society is always going to have people that have more and people that have less, because any system that tried to even that out would be unable to move forward because of it's designed inadaptability.

I find Deneen indicting because I’m adaptable. I was reading my book on my way to Ecuador with my laptop by my side. I went through bankruptcy last year, so I don’t feel wealthy. But of course, you don’t have to be, to be happy. Perhaps I am the elite, but it isn’t because I can fly around the world and work crazy long hours. It’s because I refuse to be cynical and impose that poverty on myself. I’m unafraid to be used because the only people that can’t be are useless. I’m not afraid of broken systems, because they’re all broken systems. I can accept flawed people, because that’s the only kind I’ve ever met.

[Zak Schmoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is one of those books that everyone should read and yet almost everyone is going to be frustrated, if not outright angry, with. And I think that is a good thing because my mind is full of questions and thoughts after reading this book. It is provocative without a doubt, but these are discussions that ought to be had even in areas of disagreement.

To make an incredible oversimplification of Deneen's argument, classical liberalism (not specifically left wing politics, but a political philosophy dedicated to individual rights as paramount) has proven to be unsustainable (the topic of his first book, but also a theme in this). Specifically, it promises liberty but creates a dangerous manifestation of the elites versus the masses, and it creates a meritocracy where the elites believe that they have earned the unfettered right to speak down to the masses. Deneen rejects Marxism and progressive liberalism as much as he rejects classical liberalism as both largely lead to the same endpoint of elite oppression in his perspective. He proposes an alternative that he refers to as common good conservatism. He also uses the term aristopopulism, which recognizes that complete equality is never going to happen. Therefore, the role of the those with power is to work towards the good of everyone while the role of the masses is to provide "common sense" which he loosely defines as a value in stability and tradition. In other words, there is a natural check and balance. Rather than run headlong into progress for the sake of progress, a fault he identifies in all forms of liberalism whether economic or social, we should elevate the values of stability, order, continuity, and an appreciation for tradition to provide a counterbalance that prevents excesses.

Readers of Chesterton and Belloc will recognize very strong connections to distributism, although I believe it is only identified by name one time. Specifically, many of his critiques of liberalism will sound similar to Belloc's Servile State. Many of his proposed policies are quite economically liberal and socially conservative, which will sound very much like Chesterton and Belloc as well. In his prescriptions, there are some that are going to call theocracy, and there are some that are going to call socialism. Like I said, many people will be uncomfortable with different parts of this book.

The reviews on this book in the mainstream press have not been favorable, but you would not expect them to be because he is essentially critiquing liberals and conservatives in power. Do you expect favorable reviews in the pages of the publications that perpetuate the crisis he is identifying if he is right? Like I said above, most people are going to find something to be angry about with this book. However, I think it is a conversation worth having.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand why the United States government works the way that it does. Deneen does a masterful job explaining the motivations and philosophy behind classical liberalism, which gave rise to what ultimately became the United States of America.

I agree with Deneen that the growing divide between the have and have nots, the elites and everyone else, is not sustainable and to blame for many ills in politics and society. I also agree that classical liberalism, both the progressive and conservative versions embraced by our two dominant political parties, has its shortcomings. And I agree that the roots of populist discontent are supplied by that same system that isn’t working for ordinary people.

As far as Deneen’s ideas on what to do about those problems, I’m not sure I agree. I still don’t have a sense of how exactly an aristopopulist regime would be created or maintained. I’m not sure that’s the world I’d want to live in either. (For a more detailed critique see Stephen Schneck’s excellent review in the National Catholic Reporter at https://www.ncronline.org/culture/boo....)

Still, this is a book any educated citizen should read, even if you don’t share Deneen’s views.

[Richard Abdullaev · Rating 1 out of 5]

As promised, the ideas are interesting and provocative, but the arguments tend to be hit-or-miss. Deneen mischaracterizes LGBT rights movements and Marx's philosophy, and consistently takes a hypocritical view of the working class. He argues that we should "return to family values" in a way that ignores the cultural values of non-white, non-Christian working class people. He condemns racism to virtue signal, without engaging with the consequences of the cultural changes he's suggesting. LGBT working class people are similarly ignored. Thus, Deneen appears as exactly the type of out-of-touch, paternalistic academic that he condemns.

We can't ignore the fact that American society is so fragmented and pluralistic. Mainstream, "high" culture is being killed by personalized algorithms. Presidential approval ratings are through the floor. College grows ever more accessible. There's no hope of uniting America under humble, Christian, anticapitalist virtue in a postmodern world.

On a more positive note, there are definitely some things we could really use from conservatism (true conservatism, as Deneen describes it). It does seem true that we're now prone to hating past generations (discourse on historical education) and acting recklessly towards future generations (climate change, acceleration of technological development past the govt's ability to regulate it). Perhaps some of us need to feel a bit of pride for our predecessors. Those of us that want to make things better need something to fight for, not against. Deneen has clearly read enough postmodern thought to describe, often quite accurately, the damage that liberalism has done. I certainly challenged some of my opinions and learned something from this book, and for that, I enjoyed it, even if the arguments were hard to take seriously at times.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regime Change, Patrick Deneen’s much-anticipated successor to the paradigm-shifting Why Liberalism Failed, is among the first examples of a new genre of right-wing polemic to which some have applied the label of “Restorationism.” Recognizing, as many on the right now do, that the ideology which has vested itself in the garb of “conservatism” for half a century is in reality a species of liberalism—and thus impotent to provide a viable alternative to the now ubiquitous and hegemonic logics of liberal atomism and progressive experimentalism—restorationists embrace the paradox of a revolutionary conservatism, arguing that only a radical disruption of the prevailing liberal elite’s institutional capture and rhetorical self-reinforcement can restore a society wedded to the traditional concerns of stability, continuity, and civil harmony.

The cult of disruption—whether in Washington, Wall Street, or Silicon Valley—must be disrupted. The ideology of “progress”—conceived as the lionization of possessive individualism, the perpetual “creative destruction” of traditional social and cultural forms (and the security and solidarity they sustain) in the name of “innovation” and “growth,” and the elevation of a hyper-specialized and narrowly-utilitarian technocracy over the common sense of the masses and the accumulated moral wisdom of generations—must be relegated to the dustbin of history. Deneen’s term for this is “Aristopopulism”: the application of populist means toward conservative ends, or the limited engagement in what previous generations of conservatives might have derided as “class warfare” in the interest of securing genuine class harmony according to the traditional ideal of the mixed constitution. Only a renascent “common-good conservatism” in the vein of Burke and Disraeli can transcend the destructive antagonism between populists—left and right—and the defenders of an unsustainable status quo.

The question of how to harmonize the interests of “the few” and “the many” is one of the oldest in political thought. In every society, historical and contemporary, one readily distinguishes between elites—to whom financial, social, educational, and political capital is disproportionately accumulated—and the broad body of the people. The presence of an elite within every polity is an inevitable and immutable fact, as the great levelling revolutions of history have only served to prove. At their (rare) best, elites are wise, virtuous, and public-spirited custodians of their societies, utilizing their privileges to discern the common good—which itself accords with traditional value systems developed by the people themselves through generations of experience—and direct public policy in its service, even at the expense of personal aggrandizement. At their (common) worst, elites are corrupt, oppressive, and interested only in protecting their privileges at the expense of the people. The people, for their part, are the great repository of traditional wisdom and practical know-how, the lifeblood of civilization; but they are also susceptible to demagoguery, vice, and short-term thinking. How, then, can the potential virtues of each class be cultivated, and their vices ameliorated?

For classical Western political philosophy, exemplified by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and Aquinas, the answer was to bind them together in service to the polity itself for the benefit of all. The prevailing ideal was that of the mixed constitution, in which the classes were substantively joined together in a relation of mutual solidarity, each element correcting the tendency of the other towards destructive self-interest in isolation. Such solidarity for the common good would ensure mutual prosperity and thereby stability and continuity; it would foster the broad “middling element,”—free from the vices born of excessive wealth or poverty, experienced in both governing and being governed—which Aristotle identified as the indispensable pillar of a healthy polity. The mixed constitution entails a union of classes, interests, or “estates” at every level of social organization, making it a far more substantive vehicle for socio-political cohesion than the mere “separation of powers” prescribed by the U.S. Constitution, representing as it does a Machiavellian assumption of class antagonism and a mechanism designed by the classically liberal Federalist elite to narrow the channels through which popular resistance to liberal imperatives could flow.

But while the classical ideal of the mixed constitution was rooted in a prioritization of harmony, stability, and continuity, the modern ideologies of liberalism (in both its classical and progressive varieties) and Marxism instead championed varying conceptions of “progress” as the primary object of human life; and in so doing, their advocates conceived of their own class as the standard-bearer of progress, and the other as a dangerous force of reaction that must be overcome for the fulfillment of the human destiny. When “progress,” however conceived, superseded stability and continuity as the primary public imperative, those social elements that stood in the way of “creative destruction” or resisted the imposition of new “experiments in living” came to be regarded as class enemies.

Deneen uses a simple four-quadrant chart to illustrate the respective class alignments of the prominent modern political ideologies of the West. Classical liberals favor the few over the many, because they idolize a small elite of entrepreneurs who they believe to be the vanguard of economic growth and prosperity, which in turn improves the lot of poor and rich alike; while they fear that the “levelling” effects of popular redistribution efforts, arising as they do in the face of the sharp inequalities generated by market forces, will stifle innovation.

Progressive liberals likewise side with the few; not, as with classical liberals, because the many are too “progressive” in the left-wing sense, but instead because they are too conservative. Whereas classical liberals champion the privately-administered market as the locus of progress, concerning themselves with the protection of capital and property rights for that purpose, progressive liberals locate the mechanism of progress in the social domain, where it takes the form of regime-promoted “experiments in living” intended to undermine the tyrannies of custom and parochialism—the province of the many. J.S. Mill is Deneen’s favorite exemplar of the progressive liberal tradition, as well as his choicest punching bag: he takes pains to point out that Mill advocated political despotism, and even slavery, as acceptable measures to be taken by government and corporate interests for the “improvement” of “barbarians” at home and abroad, whom he believed to be shackled by custom and therefore lacking a real history. Deneen sees the phenomenon of “wokeism”—defined here as the aggressive usage of institutional power against increasingly subjectivized and psychologized “harms” supposedly inflicted on various identity groups, a proliferating number of which are themselves constituted as superficially eccentric ways of life—as a logical development of Mill’s harm principle, which has now enthroned itself without limitation as the sole criterion of social policy.

Marxists, by contrast with liberals of both the classical and progressive stripes, favored the many over the few, primarily because they saw the former as the progressive element of society and envisioned a future in which proletarian ownership of the means of production would inaugurate a new phase of historical development; but they were continually disappointed by the insufficiency of proletarian class consciousness, and Marxism itself was greatly diminished as an ideology of world-historical significance after the fall of the Soviet Union; though it could perhaps be renewed by the ascendancy of China under Xi Jinping, who seems to espouse a more doctrinaire Marxism than did his immediate predecessors.

Conservatives, rounding out Deneen’s chart, have generally favored the many over the few precisely because of their inherent conservatism, practicality, and wisdom. But conservatism also distinguishes itself from the other three major political ideologies by its rejection of the primacy of progress and its appreciation for the classical ideal of the mixed constitution. Conservatism is neither an “elitist” nor a “populist” philosophy; it seeks to protect the customary and traditional ways of life that arise from the bottom up amongst ordinary people, but it also recognizes the necessity of an elite: one that will serve, protect, and steward traditional social forms and experiential wisdom rather than setting itself in opposition to these in the name of material or social “improvement.” Facing the Frankenstein’s monster created by the alliance between classical and progressive liberalism, and recognizing the mistaken premises and historical ineffectuality of the Marxist left, it is Deneen’s contention that only a common-good conservatism can midwife a real and sustainable postliberal order. Hence the need for Aristopopulism as a necessarily radical mechanism for the promotion of traditional aims.

Deneen ends the book with a bold list of policy proposals that he believes would cohere with the interests of Aristopopulism. These would include:

the adoption of the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, an unratified amendment proposed in 1789 that would provide one Representative in the House for every 50,000 constituents, and would consequently expand House membership from the current 435 to a figure somewhere around 6,000;

the adoption of public policies consciously focused on the interests of “estates” rather than individuals, such as the German laws requiring worker representation in corporate governance;

the “breaking up” of major metropolitan areas, which have increasingly monopolized economic, technological, and cultural capital, just as the progressive movement of the early twentieth century did with corporate trusts;

the institution of mandatory military service (or perhaps alternative forms of public service as well) for the purpose of promoting public-spiritedness and bringing people from different regions and walks of life together;

the creation of a “two-track” system of higher education similar to that employed in other countries, giving students a choice between a traditional four-year baccalaureate education or occupational training, thereby resolving both the “overproduction” of humanities and social science graduates and the dearth of trade workers effecting many parts of the country;

the recovery of the nation’s manufacturing base from abroad through economic protectionism;

tougher restrictions on wage-suppressing immigration, as well as steeper penalties for firms that employ illegal immigrants;

the return of public morality laws, which have been implemented in most jurisdictions for most of American history;

and the creation of a “family czar” to focus on creating the social and economic conditions that encourage family formation.


Food for discussion, at least.

[Ian Barnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Why Liberalism Failed, this deserves more of a 3.5 rating than a 4.
While I appreciated that his prior book was very accessible, I don't think Deneen makes up for the shortcomings of his argument in the same way here.
I expect this book is likely to be frustrating to most of its readers. Most people in America will fundamentally disagree with Deneen; they are the liberals he speaks of and those who side with them. Those who are inclined to agree with his premises, however, are going to be split. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen took a secular approach. Though his argument was imperfect, it was something I could show to any 'conservative' friend who wouldn't be turned away because it was blatantly Christian. Here Deneen starts off in the same secular voice, and his argument is weaker for it. Those who want the anti-liberal approach without the Christianity are going to be sorely disappointed by the turn Deneen takes in the final fifty pages. Those, like me, who want (and expected to read) a Christian solution will be disappointed it didn't show more strongly. All will be disappointed by the buildup of a call to revolution, and then a dearth of action items for the commoners (besides prayer, which truthfully needs its own book-length breakdown).
I found Deneen's argument did get stronger as the page count grew. (I thought he should argue for subidiarity, then ten pages later he mentions it. Same for his discussion of Aristotle and the mixed constitution, and later the call to religion). Deneen says all the right things, specifically the calls to reintegrate what liberalism has disintegrated, but I still was not fully impressed by his argument. I can't overlook the first half of the book essentially arguing for virtue ethics without actually discussing virtue. It is the same as leaving out the Christian aspect in Why Liberalism Failed. That argument was still functional; I find this one equally more compelling and more disappointing.
I wanted to read the Catholic version of this book, but this is far weaker and unwilling to be explicit. I am still grateful for the work done here to create solidarity between classes. Deneen walks back into Plato's cave and shows us the errors of the drawings on the walls; I only wish he did a better job trying to lead us out.

[Randall Spears · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of interesting stuff in here. Similar to the author's previous book, but with more prescriptions. His central prescription is something he calls "common-good conservatism". I'm fully on board with his ideas to cultivate a society that fosters community, culture, and social bonds. I agree that the ruling class should rule with the common good of the working class at the forefront. His ideas have elements of Marxism/socialism, but he critiques Marxism's drive toward constant revolution and its reliance on an elite class to cultivate that drive, oftentimes against the wishes of the working class that it sees as the benefactor of the system. One of the primary themes of the book is a criticism of the march of progress, which is an interesting point that most westerners may find perplexing. His point seems to be that society will always change and evolve, but the hyper-focus on progress at all costs, rather than striking a balance between progress and stability, is detrimental to the fabric of society. He loses me with his clear bias toward Christianity, but I tend to agree that the common man needs something spiritual in his life. At the very least, I'm on board with the ideas that:
- We need to cultivate community through family, workers unions, and local and generational traditions, and real culture (rather than the empty pop anti-culture that dominates modern liberal society)
- Corporate power needs to be dismantled in favor of small and local economies
- Wealth, power, and social capital need to be redistributed to the working class

Overall a great read and a contrarian perspective that will make you think.

[Patrick Santino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deneen’s sequel to Why Liberalism Failed, which I thought was an excellent sledgehammer & the best pulse on political symptoms I’ve ever read. But the focus of that book was one long negative critique, here is finally the positive advancement of an alternative. ... There was actually a lot covered, too much to try to highlight, but the alternate title of this book could have easily been The Few vs The Many. He thoroughly articulated that libertarians (& even classical liberals) are in no way shape or form conservative. Aristotle’s common sense > Plato’s Philosopher King. Common sense organically leads towards the common good which leads to the benefit of all.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone who is fed up with politics—and I think that is every person in America today—should read this book. Patrick Deneen’s earlier book, Why Liberalism Failed, diagnosed the problem with our contemporary political order, but this book gives the solution, which is a new order based on the Catholic principles of social justice, solidarity and subsidiarity. He does this without ever explicitly naming these principles as part of Catholic teaching, but instead shows how they are based in the classical answers to ancient philosophical debates on how best to solve the problem in every society between the haves and the have-nots. Dorothy Day, one of my personal heroes, would have loved this book. A good society isn’t one that gives everyone the most liberty possible but is one that makes it “easier for people to be good.”

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really enjoyed this read. deeply intriguing— almost equal parts laughable and incisive. he’ll hand-wave an absurd generalization and follow it up with an extremely astute critique. above all it was challenging and made me think every step of the way. if you enjoy contemplating the nature of power, governance, and society, and are trying to figure out where the hell we go from here, this book is for you. i don’t think it’s the way forward necessarily, but certainly the start of an interesting conversation

[Alex Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the most annoying things about Patrick Deneen's previous book was that he diagnosed a lot of problems, but his solutions were all extremely vague and mostly thrown together in a final chapter. And when I heard his interview on the Ezra Klein show, he was frustratingly obtuse about political policy. The heart of this -- and other neoreactionary writers -- is that all of them seem to want a monarchy but they're too chickenshit to say it out loud. The techbros will call this figurehead a "CEO" or "executive" but what they really want is a king. It annoys the shit out of me, especially when writers like Patrick Deneen go on and on about the failures of liberal philosophy, and then use Founding Fathers rhetoric to back up their points. Bro(s), the Founding Fathers would be absolutely mortified with the authoritarian nonsense you guys are advocating for (and enacting in America right now), and furthermore, if the problem with everything is an inherent vice with liberal philosophy, then why do you feel the need to invoke Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison, when you can scarcely get *more* Enlightenment-pilled than those guys? It feels hollow and phony because what these people want ISN'T American, and they know it, but they adopt these signifiers to curry cheap support for their views. Anyways, I'm rambling.

I went into REGIME CHANGE with low expectations. I disagree with Deneen on SO much, but I find his perspective to be extremely interesting. He comes across like a born-again Catholic recovering addict who has spent his adult life in Ivy League institutions and harbors a deep self-hatred because of it. He rants and rants about elite colleges, and it's rich given Deneen's vocation and more importantly, where he chooses to work / get education. Yet another thing about these neoreactionary guys like JD Vance. They sure love to complain about the institutions that gave them a platform / power as if they didn't CHOOSE to enjoy the fruits of those poisoned trees, pulling the ladder up behind them. It's puzzling why Deneen loves to preface Ivy League writers with things like "Harvard Political Scientist So and So writes..." and then wants to use their arguments as positive support for his own commentary. And in the same breath, he'll talk about how professors are contemptuous of the working class. Well, which is it? Are these Harvard Professors worth listening to or not? Are these Founding Fathers right or misguided? Deneen wants it both ways. He can't stop citing all these elites with specialized, abstract interests when he agrees with them. Ugh, it's so annoying.

And it's regrettable that Deneen wades into so much of the culture war 24-hour news cycle topics. I know that "culture war" is part of his own postliberal diagnosis, but can we PLEASE talk about another country? If the problem with American happiness / cohesion is that the foundations of Liberal philosophy is weak, then why aren't we comparing American society to literally any non-liberal society? Let's talk about collectivism cultures. No? Okay fine, let's talk about places like Hungary or Russia where Orban and Putin have essentially installed themselves as monarchs and use their power to dictate a top-down cultural shift towards tradition. No? This makes Deneen and his writing feel as idealized as Marx, who he'll tell you might "work on paper" but not in reality. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh pot, kettle, etc.

Had this at 3 stars, but I realized I have almost nothing but annoyance / criticisms to share, so maybe I didn't like it as much as I thought. A good overview of current neoreactionary thought (and a playbook for where the current administration wants to take us), but ultimately it's not as deep or serious as it thinks it is.

[Alex Benach · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well i didnt like this one!

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vladimir Lenin taught that “he who says A must say B.” He was correct, but Patrick Deneen has not listened. Deneen says A, that our Regime, our ruling class, is destructive and evil. But he then refuses to say B, that the Regime is therefore wholly odious and illegitimate, and before any new system is possible, it must be destroyed. Instead, Deneen’s response to A is magical thinking. When the people peacefully complain enough, you see, the Regime will dismantle itself voluntarily and hand over power to a new ruling class, which will hold and implement opposite views on every matter under the sun. This absurd fantasy, even when cushioned within much fancy philosophy, harms rather than advances the postliberal project.

I looked forward to this book, which should have been the culmination of Deneen’s bold decade-long project to discredit and replace the so-called Enlightenment, and should have cemented his position as one of the most important leaders of the postliberal American Right. Beginning in 2016’s Conserving America?, and continuing with the outstanding Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen ably described the origin of our present discontents, namely the inherent defects of Enlightenment ideology, that is, Left ideology. I will not repeat his analyses and arguments from those earlier works here, although you should read my summaries of them, and my thoughts on them. But here Deneen’s project dies with a whimper, either because he actually believes, contrary to all history and common sense, that in politics one can get a free lunch, or because he is afraid to identify himself as an genuine enemy of the Regime, thus associating himself with the wrong sort of people, and thereby risk being expelled from polite society, membership in which is wholly controlled by the Regime.

Still, Deneen’s analysis in Regime Change is of some value, so let’s examine it. In his earlier works, Deneen’s main focus was liberty and its limitations. The prime aims of Left ideology (what Deneen prefers to call liberalism), as I often say, are a never-ending and always-increasing demand for emancipation from unchosen bonds (that is to say, unlimited liberty), combined with forced egalitarianism, all in service of creating a utopia. While in an inchoate sense the Left has existed since the Serpent in the Garden, as a political philosophy this dogma only arose with the Enlightenment, which was nothing more than the reification of the most destructive desires of mankind. Here Deneen expands his earlier frame, mapping Left ideology onto a much older political divide, the eternal split between the many and the few.

As Deneen outlines, what exactly constitutes the few and the many differs across societies, but every society has this division, of elite and non-elite, in which a small group has disproportionate control of both wealth and power, leading inevitably to conflict. Before the rise of Left ideology, proposed solutions to this problem revolved around creation of balance between these two broad classes, in order to secure the common good. Given the nature of mankind, results were variable. The Left, since 1789, has upended this search for balance in favor of the search for progress, for the removal of limitations, for supposed emancipation, held to obviate the need for balance. The cretinous John Stuart Mill offers the clearest exposition of this philosophy, which in practice has simply resulted in a new few and a new many, along with the destruction of all Western societies. Deneen’s project is to restore the older search for balance.

That’s not to say, although Deneen only touches on it and it is a topic for another day, that America’s many are a reservoir of virtue; they are in very bad shape indeed, a direct result of emancipation and forced egalitarianism. But the few are worthless and irredeemable, and Deneen counts the ways, in the competent first section of his book. We discuss the managerial elite, identity politics as a political tool, the inevitable creation of new hierarchies, and so on. The result, Deneen tells us repeatedly, is that we live in a tyranny. He is certainly correct there.

The tyranny Deneen identifies is not only the most obvious tyranny, of what is sometimes called the progressive Left, because that is merely one head of the Left hydra. The Left also includes so-called classical liberalism, which is roughly coterminous with what has, since the 1950s, been called “conservatism,” a false label, as well as Marxism and its variants. All strands within liberalism posit the need for an elite to lead the way to an emancipated, egalitarian future, differing only in who should compose that elite and how the people participate, especially in their economic life. (Deneen fails to understand how a Left elite can coexist with simultaneous Left demands for egalitarianism, because he does not understand that call for egalitarianism is simply a call to steal from, then kill, whoever the kulaks of the age are, not a call for real leveling, except in the utopia that is always just over the horizon.) But the progressive Left, classical liberals, and Marxists all reject the idea of the many and the few together cooperating to advance the common good. Instead, the elite is to deliver progress, supposedly good things, to the masses, regardless of whether the masses think they are receiving good things.

So far, so good. Then, in rambling fashion, Deneen tells us how we should instead be governed—by a mixed constitution, by which he means a governing form designed to alleviate the conflict between the elites and the masses, which at the same time rejects liberalism. We get Aristotle and Plato, we get Edmund Burke, we get Thomas Aquinas, Benjamin Disraeli, and Alexis de Tocqueville. We get discussion of whether a mixed constitution should seek blending of high and low, to create something new, or instead counterpoise a separate high and low. It’s somewhat interesting, though not really new, and often the reader wonders where we are going, or whether we’ve stumbled onto an undergraduate seminar led by a slightly inebriated professor. Thus, Deneen cites Polybius for his famous analysis of the Roman mixed constitution, and claims that Polybius said that the “benefits of kingship were manifested in the unitary rule of the emperor,” while being restrained by the political power of the common citizens. But Polybius died in the second century B.C.; he never saw a Roman emperor. He was talking about the Republic, where the monarchical element was the consuls; the Empire was not a mixed government. Moreover, the common citizens had very little direct political power in the Roman system; their interests were instead represented by the tribunes of the plebs, whose primary power was veto. The reader wonders if the professor should have passed on hitting the bar before class, and what else is a little off in this analysis.

Despite the reader’s uneasy feeling, however, we are, indeed, going somewhere. The point is to offer an alternative, which we reach after 150 pages—in the last third of the book, headed “What Is To Be Done?,” with credit for the phrase given neither to Lenin nor to Nikolay Chernyshevsky. What is to be done is to call for “aristopopulism,” which Deneen not-very-crisply defines essentially as a system in which the elite and the many each improve the other while both seeking to advance the common good. Neither the elite nor the masses have all the answers; the former, ideally, have a higher level of competency and focus, while the latter are often a repository of common sense. Together, it is feasible to reach a political balance between high and low that will create a good society.

I suppose that’s a possible future, even if one without historical precedents (Deneen offers none, nor could he, though probably the American Founding comes closest), but what we don’t get is any insight into how this new thing is going to be created. We instead get eighty pages of aspirational bromides. “The creation of a new elite is essential,” and its first act must be to replace the existing elite. No doubt it is, and it must be, but no mechanism is offered to make either happen. Over and over we hear this or that “should” happen, “must” happen, “needs to” happen, but not any way for it to manifest. I will spare the reader a detailing of the obvious—that the Regime will never permit any erosion of its power, and will terrorize or kill anyone who rises up to actually threaten its power. The rule of law is long gone, the rule of iron is here, and it seems likely to me that whatever is next, after a crisis that destroys our fragile Regime, will involve the rule of lead, and perhaps after that a new society. Deneen, either afraid or obtuse, adverts to none of this.

This is bad enough, mostly because the reader has the sneaking suspicion that Deneen’s real, but unstated, prescription is “vote harder,” but worse is his repeated insistence on weakening what he says by constantly complying with the demands of his, and our, enemies about how we are allowed to think and talk. He calls for an aristocracy but adopts a defensive crouch about aristocracy, because that’s what the Left demands. Similarly, it means much more than one might think that Deneen meekly uses “she” and “her” as generic pronouns. It betrays either cowardice or internalization of Left semiotics. He even translates the medieval maxim Cuius regio, eius religio as “Whose realm, their religion.”

But these reflexive obeisances to the Left are small beans compared to the way he heaps ashes on his head, and your head, about so-called racism, by which he does not mean the ubiquitous anti-white hatred, with concrete and often fatal effects, today aggressively demanded by our elites, but instead non-specific thought crimes supposedly directed at non-white people by white people. Under no circumstances, we are told, can aristopopulism do anything but make ending this supposed racism and its imaginary consequences a primary goal. This obeisance to the Left leads Deneen to write bizarre passages, in which he contorts himself into a pretzel. For example, we are told that black lack of present-day success in America is due not to the Left destruction of the black family and community since the 1960s, nor to any inherent racial differences, nor even to long-past housing discrimination or Jim Crow. Rather, it is due to black slave families being separated more than 150 years ago, which is somehow the fault of today’s white people, and means black people must be eternally elevated by any aristopopulist system to expiate this long ago sin.

The craziness of this beggars belief, and the approach Deneen demands, if implemented, would instantly cripple both the effectiveness and legitimacy of aristopopulism. In fact, contra Deneen, any new system after the end of our current Regime, if it desires the loyalty of the common people, should reject all claims that anything but minor interpersonal racism exists (and that directed mostly at white people), declare that regardless, the phenomenon is utterly unimportant, and reject any responsibility for altering differential racial outcomes, while removing all prohibitions on free association. No surprise, nothing like this obvious and crucial program emerges from Deneen’s pages.

Deneen seems completely to fail to understand, or more likely, not being dumb, he knows he cannot be seen to understand, that the supposed racism of whites is the keystone of the Left project in America, because endless wailing about it has proven crucial to achieving both of their two core aims. It is a never-ending trump card with which to demand more supposed emancipation, but the chief form of that emancipation is the transfer of wealth from productive whites to unproductive non-whites (and parasitic white email-class elites), which also serves the goal of forced egalitarianism, as the engines of productivity are silenced, as airplanes fall from the sky and the electricity fails. The only way to deal with this farce is to reject it without any discussion whatsoever. But Deneen does the opposite.

On a philosophical level, Deneen’s contortions about race relations are merely part of a larger defect with Deneen’s aristopopulism. He does not address that a society that is too heterogenous, or too diverse, in the cant of the Left, can never find the common good, because the people lack adequate common interests. For example, Deneen assumes without analysis that working class blacks have interests identical to working class whites, and that the only reason the two groups don’t cooperate is a divide-and-conquer strategy used by “mostly native, mostly white overclass elites.” Well, maybe. But also maybe, especially after years of hatred being whipped up against whites, blacks and whites don’t have enough in common anymore for there to be a common good between them, other than at the highest level of generality, at which point the common good becomes essentially meaningless. The same is true of many other divides in America, which suggests breaking up America is the way to go. You won’t find the slightest hint of that in this book, though.

Deneen obviously senses the problem that heterogeneity is fatal to the common good, but he does not want to address it directly, because he might be Doing a Racism. Yet he has to offer a solution to the Regime’s tyranny. So he repeatedly refers to an “increasingly multiracial, multiethnic working class” supposedly opposed to our elites, and therefore to the Regime, from which a challenge to the Regime will spring. This working class will create a new elite:

What is first needed is a “mixing” that shatters the blindered consensus of the elite, a mixing that must begin with the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism. In order to achieve this end, control and effective application of political power will have to be directed especially at changing or at least circumventing current cultural as well as economic institutions from which progressive parties exercise their considerable power. Otherwise, those institutions will be utilized to circumvent and obstruct the only avenue to redress available to the “many”: demotic power. The aim should not be to achieve “balance” or a form of “democratic pluralism” that imagines a successful regime comprised of checks and balances, but rather, the creation of a new elite that is aligned with the values and needs of ordinary working people.

. . .

What is needed is the application of Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends—the use of powerful political resistance by the populace against the natural advantages of the elite to create a mixed constitution . . . in which genuine common good is the result.

We can leave aside that Deneen’s class analysis is simplistic in the extreme—he equates the “many” with the “working class,” whereas the many are in fact comprised of several very distinct classes with divergent interests, including the underclass and the middle class. There is no unified non-elite class, which makes it impossible for their “demotic power” to be “asserted.” This is basic elite theory, about which Deneen seems to know nothing. Moreover, Deneen keeps blurring his calls for a new elite with, among other softenings, positing a cooperative relationship, rather than a paternalistic relationship, between the many and few. Deneen ignores that the common people never directly balance the elites. Instead, ideally, they act as a damper on elite action, with their customary rights preventing any type of rapid change. They do not and will not get together with the elites to improve each other, in some kind of healing circle where everyone hugs it out. The elites rule, always and everywhere, and ideally they keep the good of the masses in mind, either out of self-interest or as a moral duty. Regardless of whether the many are multiracial and multiethnic, or completely homogenous, this is the way it has always been, and always will be.

To the extent that Deneen simply wants a new elite that will force a new society, he is certainly on firm ground. I’m all for that. The Left is evil. It must be destroyed. A new elite should cauterize anything that remains and then set up a mixed government, using the twelve pillars of Foundationalism as a guide. But instead of a call for this obvious solution to the need for regime change, we get weak tea. Rather than explaining how the new elite should confiscate the wealth of all members of the existing Regime, then, after trials and adequate direct punishments, lustrate and exile or rusticate all remaining important members of the Regime, we get calls for various modest technical/structural changes, such as massively increasing the number of members of the House of Representatives and having bureaucrats work outside Washington. These are old ideas, and last I checked, the Regime wasn’t permitting them. Then Deneen suggests, big reveal, a national service requirement. Aside from that would be an obvious violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, which he ignores, that would simply grant massive power to the Regime, which would have a new huge labor pool to direct to its ends. And Deneen’s other specific political prescriptions are no better and no more realistic.

To be fair, Deneen does find his footing when it comes to the question of immigration. The problem is . . . [review completes as first comment]

[Corrinne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deneen gives interesting suggestions in the last part of the book, and accurately describes some of the tensions in modern America. However, the book overall tends to be very repetitive, and I’m not convinced that his suggestions constitute a “regime change.”

[Ricardo Vela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aunque me ha costado pues por momentos es algo farragoso y se "pierde" me ha gustado la tesis de Deneen sobre el colapso del liberalismo (que trató en su anterior libro "Por qué ha fracasado el liberalismo") y su propuesta de una Constitución mixta en el que integrar el sentido común del pueblo y superar por elevación el anhelo de progreso que termina lastrando el verdadero crecimiento de las sociedad.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Regime Change” is the sequel to “Why Liberalism Failed”, Deneen’s extraordinarily insightful look into our ‘liberal’ world order, particularly the ghosts in the machine that made it fail. The inconsistencies ‘baked in’ which took its greatest strengths and turned them into the tools that killed it. Deneen follows this on with an exploration of what might be done next, given that liberalism failed.

I have some reactions to this book, in no particular order. First, my best takeaway was the quote from G.K. Chesterton, “…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.” I like that description. The dead – people like my grandfathers, who both served America in countless ways – also vote; through the layers carefully curated and stacked one on top of the other that have taken us to commanding heights. They, who did build this, get a say. ‘Custom’ is how that say is expressed. Second, however, is to be careful with our obsession with the past. Nostalgia is memory with the pain removed; and there is nothing more nostalgic than memories experienced by an ancestor where the pain has been extirpated completely. My point here is that we should not forget that ‘liberalism’ – which has failed – was a monumental human effort to make a world that is a better place for people to live in. What Jesus meant when He said, “I have come to give you life, and life more abundant.” Of course that doesn’t mean fast fashion, gender confusion and addiction to consuming. But it does recognize that life as it was for my ancestor – who came to America in the early 1850s alone to try and make a go of it – was not that great in England. The past, for so many people, was a place of boredom and violence and vulnerability. It’s easy to decry these advances from our air conditioned homes where hot water runs freely. I know this, because life right now – in most of Africa, for example – is nasty, brutish and short. They’d love a slice of our ‘liberalism’. Our more abundant life.

Third, Deneen is not wrong that the genesis of all this is the ‘custom’, the traditions that Chesterton called “Democracy of the dead”. They gave us the trial and error, so we need not repeat it; like we are also giving trial and error so our children don’t have to make our mistakes. Our elders get a vote.

Then Deneen channels Lenin, a little bit, in his chapter “What Is To Be Done”. Which is my fourth point; this is where we all fall down. Deneen paints a picture that is so dramatically bad (and I’m not saying he is wrong), but he then offers a list of tweaks. It reminded me of Michael Anton in “Flight 93 Election”:

Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems? If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

Michael Anton: The Flight 93 Election
Most of Deneen’s tweaks are good ideas, but if our liberalism has indeed failed all these ideas would likely be coopted by the winners. That is the point after all; liberalism is no longer ‘fair’, it is stacked against half of the country and on purpose. We cannot trust it to police itself.

It is interesting (five) that Deneen channels James Burnham’s “Managerial Revolution” – I too found that work extremely insightful insofar as it described (it was written 80 years ago) the reorganization of our post-modern post-capitalist society into a new order, and what that order would look like. What we effectively are seeing in America is the end of the Managerial Revolution and the consolidation of what Matthew Stewart called the “New American Aristocracy“. It is doing so using old techniques, creating barriers to joining (Angus Deaton wrote about this, “raising the ladders as they ascend”) and pitting the oppressed against each other, making them think they are fighting for some value they hold, and hoodwinking them into believing they are on some epic utopian quest. Utopia is, after all, very compelling. It is not a surprise that the foot-soldiers the new aristocracy uses are mostly the ‘progressive liberals’ – they who think in collectives and are wired to utopianism and the efforts of tinkering with humanity are also most comfortable inside massive bureaucracies and therefore control all the tools that the 9.9% need to consolidate their rule. And if that means the occasional drag show, the godless aristocracy is OK with that as they were also OK with the depravities of the courts of the kings in days past. They are just happy to be in control. Meanwhile the ‘deplorables’, well they don’t like them anyway so using them as an effective lighthing rod against which to deploy their army of bureaucrats. Great.

Deneen does his best work (six) describing colleges (he is after all a professor) and the way they were usurped by the aforementioned ‘managers’ in order to be put to the full task of curating America’s new 9.9%. Lip service to diversity, but keep them so expensive and with such a constrained code of ‘values’ (we would call them anti-values) that they become the exclusive club of the ‘haves’ against the ‘have nots’. Dr. Seuss wrote about this in the Star Belly Sneetches.

The book takes on a notably populist tone (seven). It falls into the trap of bestowing upon ‘the people’ and their customs a sort of sacred place. In that way it is very Lev Tolstoy. The idea is that America is experiencing tremendous stress because we have abandoned the faith of our fathers, and the empty hole in our hearts that used to be filled with the Holy Spirit we are now trying to fill with stuff (consumer culture), with ideology (the utopian push for perfection over the next battlefield), or with identity (maybe the reason I’m miserable is I’m actually a chick, not a dude?). The peasants, as the protectors of faith and custom in a nostalgic past, are the answer. The problem with that is the same problem Tolstoy ran into; each time he left St. Petersburg to commune with his peasants at Yasnaya Polyana he found them to be a tiresome lot – scheming and greedy and base. It is that terrible contradiction of populism (the solution is captured best in the movie “The Gladiator” in the person of Senator Gracchus “I don’t claim to be of the people; but I do try and be for the people”). Incidentally I also address this conundrum in my play “Dreams of the Defeated“.

My final point (eight), Deneen quotes Tocqueville a lot. He does not however quote my favorite statement from “Democracy in America” — “…nothing is more opposed to the well-being and the freedom of men than vast empires.” America is experiencing stress because the prize over which we fight – Washington DC – is the greatest jewel in history. The fame, fortune, and raw power of “The Capital” know no comparison. Even ancient Rome was foreign to the Mayans or the Incas. But who hasn’t heard of the White House? Better still, who in this world – even in its dark corners – is not affected in their daily lives by decisions made in the halls of American power? People don’t fight over who is the Prime Minister of Iceland, because who cares? Managing waste collection, electricity generation, improvement of test scores in public schools — that is boring. But being feted by celebrities while I deploy my armies abroad; now that is cool. I don’t know the solution to this problem; maybe it has no solution. If America were not powerful, Russia and China would be and all the advances that are – yes – good, the freedom to speak our minds and our epic project of self government would end, not only here but the world over. And that would be a tragedy. But we do need a solutions revolution. A return to the pursuit of order; instead of the 9.9% attempts to maintain control by socially engineering our society (and in doing so sewing mayhem and misrule). How to break that down is the question – I’ve always been partial to a tremendously robust 10th Amendment and very, very few national ‘rights’ (only those as envisioned by the framers). But I fear that ship, too, has sailed.

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Patrick Deneen book with incredible insights but a few major flaws. Would give this 3.5 stars if I could, which is more than I've given his other works because he puts forth more forward-thinking ideas here.

In "Regime Change", Deneen attempts to do what he was missing in "Why Liberalism Failed", which is to provide a way forward for post-liberalism. His idea (which he's spoken about over the years) is something he calls aristopopulism. Essentially, aristopopulism is the replacement of the current elite with an elite who recognizes the common people as conservative and governs in favor of those common people. This requires a mixed constitution, an idea Deneen draws from figures like Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. A mixed constitution ideally empowers both the working people and the elites to check one another but also to bring out the best in one another as groups. The people would organically develop customs and an elite chosen by the people and accountable to them would defend those customs. Today, rising inequality and declining social capital has made this difficult, as social classes no longer mix like they once did. Ideas of noblesse oblige have concurrently fallen by the wayside.

A mixed constitution and even aristopopulism aren't crazy ideas at all. As somebody (vaguely) left-leaning, I place more of a premium on equality than Deneen does (and surely more of a premium on pluralism) but I recognize that there will always be a ruling class and that there will always be rich and poor. So why shouldn't we have a virtuous elite who respects the will of the people? Many historical thinkers have come to this conclusion too. In these pages, Deneen gestures at the long history of these ideas--from the classics through Burke and Disraeli through papal enciclycals through Tocqueville. He makes some genuinely good points about the role societal leaders should play, points concordant with those made by TS Eliot in Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

As expected, Deneen reviews some of his classic propositions about how liberal thinking has come to define both left and right in different ways and about how liberalism has left us atomized and isolated. He argues that the major political parties are converging into a uniparty of liberalism, although I find this hard to square with the utter divergence of both parties away from any kind of collaboration. But he's exactly right in pointing out how left and right adopt liberalism when it suits them and end up valuing expertise over common wisdom or popular sentiment. And his criticisms of Marxism, despite his theory (heavy on class) sharing some superficial resemblances to it are stellar.

Yet Deneen has a far too conservative view of what ordinary people want. Yes, they generally do have more socially moderate views than well-off social libertarians, but pro-life initiatives recently failed in deep red places like Kansas and Kentucky (losing many working class and rural voters). Deneen needs to address that many Americans just want to be left alone, but this might require him to step back from the position that there is an authentically right-leaning base waiting to be unleashed by his desired political coalition. In reality, Americans are more committed (and probably always will be) to the liberal project than Deneen would hope for. Perhaps that's a good thing to some extent, because I worry about what Deneen's proposed "Machiavellian means" would entail for pluralism.

I still think it's important to highlight the non-liberal histories and figures in American life, and I applaud Deneen for doing so because we need a counterweight to neoliberal hyper-individualism in both economic and social spheres. The actual policy solutions he proposes represent laudable enactments of this tradition. They are largely agreeable to me--things like expanding the US House, supporting family wages so only one parent has to work, non-military national service, codetermination in companies, etc. Deneen does not call for sweeping centralization like Adrian Vermeule does, perhaps a legacy of his time hanging in localist circles. But these policies, commendable as they are, wouldn't overturn the liberal order Deneen constantly makes out to be the enemy. Nor, dare I say, should we try to overturn it. Instead, Deneen's policy solutions are part of what we need to save liberalism from its own undoing. Post-liberal in a sense, but not anti-liberal or illiberal.

But sometimes Deneen's overwrought rhetoric is concerning, especially because it clashes with some of his more cogent analysis. While hyper-liberalism, to use Nick Timothy's phrase, is anti-conservative, so too would be the use of Machiavellian means to impose post-liberalism--Machiavellianism to me carries the connotation of using immoral means bound to corrupt the ends sought, usually in un-Christian ways. Too often, the popular political resistance Deneen applauds ends not in achieving the common good, but in a new form of tyranny when populist discontent is coopted by demagogues or grifters. The structures of liberal democracy itself, importantly tempered governed by non and preliberal forms and norms (which is a point liberals often forget about, and I'm greatful people like Deneen have made us think about this) are in fact a better starting point for a mixed constitution. This is perhaps why his reforms don't seem all that radical at the end of the day, because Deneen himself realizes we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[David Selsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunningly brilliant, as expected. From the minute I (and many others, I'm sure) finished "Why Liberalism Failed," I've been looking forward to Patrick Deneen's next book. In the interim I read his book from 2005, "Democratic Faith," and his 2016 collection of essays, "Conserving America?". I recommend both and also strongly suggest you check out the Postliberal Order Substack, where he, Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, and Adrian Vermeule (and various guest authors) hammer out the specifics of and the challenges facing common-good conservatism. As Sohrab Ahmari rightly states in his blurb on the back of this book, Deneen is the West's more important political theorist. "Why Liberalism Failed" was the most important work of political theory of the last ten years, and "Regime Change" deepens and expands the project and theorizing put forth in WLF.

Two things are important to note about Dennen: 1) He is a wonderful writer. This is a 237 page text that moves along briskly. Being able to make political theory into page-turning fare is no mean feat. You can read this book in 2 or 3 sittings, so smooth and effortless is its flow. By way of contrast, I've started and failed twice to make it past page 75 in Christopher Lasch's "The True and Only Heaven" (I will try again after reading Deneen refer to it as "magisterial.") Deneen's tone and word choice, his nuts and bolts writing talent beginning at the level of sentence structure and moving up through chapter organization and overall book construction are nonpareil. 2) He is a profoundly insightful theorist, organizer of ideas, and explainer of the American project, both past and present: what political commitments were argued over and resolved at our founding; what's transpired in the last 50 years and why; what discreet political projects mystify and obscure concerning their own commitments (and again, why); and where we are going as a country (and the West more generally).

I'm not going to break down all the arguments and conclusions of the book (my attempt would pale in comparison to what he's taken the time to write). However, I will say that throughout the book his theorizing on and criticism of identity politics and progressive liberalism overlaps nicely with some of the sharpest minds on the anti-indentitarian, class-first Left--Adolph Reed Jr., Barbara and Karen Fields, Cedric Johnson, and Walter Benn Michaels. The horseshoe theory is real. Move far enough to the left insofar one has commitments to equality of opportunity, basic human decency, communitarianism, belief there should be a "common" standard of security and flourishing for all, and you find yourself standing next to right populists (on some issues, of course--abortion and the role, if any, religion should have vis-à-vis the State being seemingly intractable obstacles to left/right populist comity).

I'll close with the observation that it takes a extra helping of bad faith and political and historical ignorance to characterize Deneen's project (in either WLF or his new book) as "far right," "theocratic," "scary," or any other perforative adjective. Like most sophisticated thinkers writing for a general audience, he takes great pains to, while sticking to his principles and not gainsaying his commitments, choose his words prudently and consciously so as not to be easily misunderstood or misrepresented. Alas, both right and left liberals, seeing no oasis beyond their liberal ideology and brooking no critique of said ideology, succumb to reductive readings of the postliberal project.

Be careful of the things you say about others in bad faith (i.e. criticism that doesn't ring true; criticism easily recognized as stemming from resentment, muddled thinking, or your own fears) because astute hearers of your words quickly lower their estimation of you the bad faith speaker as opposed to the object of your criticism whom you'd hoped your listeners would join you in disliking.

[Yoda · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Decent Succinct Overview of Historical Literature Analyzing Social Stability but Very Weak on Going Forward to a Postliberal Future

This reviewer had read Patrick Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed” and found it very interesting. It provided a very good analysis on why liberalism, defined as traditional laissez faire economic type, was endogenously unstable and why it would lead to collapse of social relations, in particular between the lower and upper classes of society. Unfortunately, that book did a very poor job at providing solutions to this problem. Very typical of “revolutionaries” like Mr. Deneen, albeit his revolution is of a “counter-revolution” nature. This reviewer purchased and listed to his sequel, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future” in order to provide Mr. Deneen an opportunity to expound on what and how this revolution would be brought about. Unfortunately, Mr. Deneen proved very disappointing.

On the positive side, in this second book, the author provides a very good overview of the historically important literature elaborating on social stability between the classes (i.e. Aristotle, Burke, etc.). This is the one positive aspect of the book and why this reviewer granted the book the positive stars he did.

Unfortunately, the book provides very little useful steps that can bring about the postliberal “regime change” that he thinks is necessary to prevent a civil war between the lower and upper classes of society. Some of his ideas are reasonable. For example, bringing back the study of the trades to secondary schools or implementing universal conscription. Unfortunately the overwhelming majority of his proposals seem very farcical with respect to being able to bring this about. For example, banning pornography, providing financial subsidies to families to reverse population decline (a la Victor Orban’s attempts in Hungary) or reinstituting family and moral values that were so prevalent in 1905s and 1960s Western Society. With respect to the first it is so ubiquitous and in such demand, within the technological society we live in, his proposal just falls flat on its face. With respect to providing subsidies to families to reverse population decline, the subsidies he mentions have been tried before in numerous nations (i.e.. Scandinavian) and have proved unable to perform as promised. The third and last, considering the degree of nihilism and commercialism in society, just seems like a fantasy.

Mr. Dennen, in his analysis of what is needed to bring regime change, unfortunately utterly ignores the importance and value of the middle class economic base. Then again, considering his philosophy is very anti-progressive in terms of technological advance and naïve with respect to its social impact (he actually believes its negative impacts can be mitigated through his social policies), this comes as no surprise.

Lastly, Mr. Deneen’s “solutions” , to a very large extent, can only be implemented by non-democratic regimes like Orban’s or Erdogan’s (in Turkey), they come at a price that many are not willing to pay, not to mention the fact that the economic materialism actually needed to pull the lower classes up through income distribution, is stunted.

All and all a very weak set of proposals and hence a weak book, albeit, as stated previously, providing a decent survey of the literature on social stability. Two stars.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this difficult to get through. I would consider myself more or less a postliberal and I'm not much of a fan of democracy for the reasons outlined in the book, so I thought this was up my alley, but instead I found it to be a weird read. The biggest issue is that somehow the language is just very obtuse and verbose, and for whatever reason I just had a hard time internalizing and digesting it even as a pretty hyperliterate person. My brain just does not like his writing style. He also does the thing where he makes oblique references that go unexplained and either you understand the subtext or you don't, and I don't think that's a good way to write a book intended for general audiences.

He also had weird takes on left-right alignment on certain issues and I think is wildly misunderstanding or maybe not even perceiving a lot of the popular movements on both the left and right and their motivations, which resulted in some bizarre analysis that does not at all comport with my own experiences and analysis as a person actually existing in those political spaces (I'm a right winger who years ago was a left winger, with a graduate education in a political field whose friends and physical environment are predominantly of the progressive/hard left but online environments mostly on the hard right - I understand both sides very well).

I found the majority of the book frustrating because of the above reasons so I was looking forward to the prescriptive section at the end where he recommends solutions. Instead, what I found was basically the right wing version of the silly utopian delusions we all make fun of Marxists for believing in. Like all of a sudden we're going to just replace our current entrenched self-serving sociopathic elite with salt of the earth center right traditionalists who appreciate the common man and our inherited traditions, want to blend with them instead of furthering their own trajectory, and want to perpetuate common sense conservatism while imposing the missing guardrails on shareholder capitalism in order to guarantee the flourishing of the working class and the maintenance of our traditions in this newly stable and class-mixed society.

Oh is that all we have to do?? Gosh, that's so simple. How have we not done it? Nothing about where we'd get these people from or what we'd do with the cancerous elite we have currently (gulags?? Mass unemployment?), or how we'd achieve that transition in practical terms (because remember, we agreed that democracy sucks) but I guess that's just nitpicky details.

So yeah, an incoherent book with a silly utopian fantasy at the end. Still giving it a mid rating because there is some interesting political theory in there but I wasn't a huge fan of this and wouldn't recommend it.

[Chris Guthrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has plenty to recommend it, but I think it lacks evidence on a main point, and is not a solid foundation for political action.

Deneen is at his best when he’s pointing out contradictions in contemporary American politics. The contradiction to which Deneen most often returns, is that our highly-educated liberal "elite" class declares inequality to be our greatest social evil, and then acts uncharitably toward a large swath of their poorer and less-educated countrymen -- calling them deplorables, clingers, etc. This contradiction, Deneen thinks, arises from a deeper absurdity that has informed the entire development of American history: namely, a belief in "progress" as an ultimate good, and a belief that progress requires some combination of revolutionary social engineering (Marxism) and laissez-faire libertarianism (Classical Liberalism). Deneen thinks that this optimism is desperate and wrong, and needs to be replaced by a genuine religious faith, from which will follow a collective self-conscious commitment to the common good (rather than to progress qua progress).

I largely agree with Deneen's social analysis, and closed his book feeling inspired by a vision of a new Christian elite, which is aware of its deep interdependence on the common people and is committed first and foremost to securing common safety, stability, and flourishing.

However, I think Deneen was too quick to locate the origins of Classical Liberalism in a deeper commitment to capital-P Progress. Deneen’s analysis leans heavily on the philosopher JS Mill, and to a lesser extent on some select quotes from Locke. I wonder whether there's an alternate story, grounded more in history than philosophy, in which Classical Liberalism arose over time as a kind of immune defense against abuses of governmental power. This is the core of American liberalism as I learned it, and I think as most Americans learned it in history class. Even today, I think, American libertarians (and libertarian-leaning Republicans) are more likely to have come by their views primarily through a fear of being unjustly harmed or coerced by the government, than through a greedy desire to practice a libertine or recklessly selfish lifestyle.

As a result, I remain unconvinced by Deneen's prophesies of the death of liberalism. And ultimately, I think Deneen fails to reconcile an obvious contradiction in his own work: his advocacy for a (disjointed and vague) political revolution of "Aristopopulism", while decrying the destabilizing and disorienting effects of every other kind of revolution.

[Matt Belisle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is getting 3 stars based on the writing, not the content. It is well written that is all I will give it.

This was recced to me during an episode of ezra klein show about where modern right is getting their playbook, i was intrigued with seeing what that may mean. This book spends the vast majority of the time bemoaning both the modern left and right (and the whole modern western worlds approach to life) as either progressive or conservative liberalism. Which fine, that is correct, what is laughable about this book is the solution Mr. Deneen envisions. He talks at length about his dislike of elites, and while I am not a fan of “elites” his definition is exceptionally broad. Seems anyone with a university degree is an elite, and is culpable in destroying community, religion and is the cause of the world’s state as it is. I’m not going to get why i disagree with his stance, but it is telling to me that his solution is “common good” and digging into this this means bring everything local, make people more mindful of their community, and best of all a gracious and benevolent aristocrat class that acts only in the well interest of the common people. He is a fan of redefining the “elite” as good in this sense, but who is elite here and who isn’t? Imagine someone who went to school for philosophy and studied akin to aristotle and socrates, the exact subsection of people he is bemoaning during the whole book. I find it laughable how many times he blames the reduction of christian virtues and christian inheritance as the reason the world is bad, while confidently and negatively using paganism to deacribe any non-christian religion (where christian ends and paganism begins, the world may never know). It’s obvious why this man left princeton (a school he seems to dislike) and went to notre dame, a bastion of christian virtues.

Anyways this was not worth my time. I rolled my eyes more than during any cheesy romance or fantasy book and really hope this is not taken seriously

[Oscar Martinez II · Rating 5 out of 5]

If "Why Liberalism Failed" is the diagnosis for many of America's societal ills then "Regime Change" is the prescribed treatment. A common criticism of "Why Liberalism Failed" is that while it did a great job of pointing out how Liberalism is currently destroying our culture, societal stability, and sense of belonging, it lacked a clear plan of action to fight back and change things for the better. This is exactly what Deneen does in "Regime Change." I remember in college I had a professor who told the class that much of the literature today (whether fiction or non-fiction) is geared towards getting people to think there is no other option. That the current society is the best we have because as much as it sucks it's better than the alternatives which are either total chaos or totalitarian dystopia. As a result, many can see things are wrong but don't really know how society can be fundamentally reshaped to make things better. Using wisdom from some of the pasts' greatest thinkers, Deneen guides his readers through an explanation of our current situation and how it can be modified to make for a better future. Deneen's alternative to the Liberalism that pervades modern America and the West more broadly? Common Good Conservatism. A true conservatism that isn't just an older form of liberalism from a few years ago but an actual tradition the foundations of which can be found all the way back to the time of ancient Athens and Jerusalem, the twin pillars of western civilization. This book is a must read, preferably after reading "Why Liberalism Failed." The only real downside of this work is that it is a bit more difficult to get through than its predecessor and requires a slower more thoughtful reading pace.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between this book & Adrian Vermule's *Common Good Constitutionalism* & *Compact* the mag, the integralists are getting better at writing, & it makes me a bit nervous. These works are far sharper than the crazed, bigoted power fantasy ramblings of Rod Dreher & Rusty Reno, &, Deneen's work here is far more specific & sophisticated than his prior book, *Why Liberalism Failed*.

I learned much from this book, especially its interesting new political quadrant along the axes of liberal v. popular & revolutionary v. conservative & its championing (even in anti-racist directions) of integration contra liberalism's disintegration. Much cringe remains, however: Christopher Lasch & Alasdair MacIntyre aren't conservative in the manner integralists think they are, mixed constitutions definitionally are anti-popular contra Deneen (democratic centralism or bust, baby), & I'm so weary of hearing of the hobgoblins of little minds: Tocqueville, free speech rights of race scientist Charles Murray (especially rich to hear from anti-liberals), & the demonic PMC. As a lumpenPMC, I attest that the PMC currently is demonic. But ultimately, conservatives like Michael Lind, Chris Buskirk, Batya Sargon-Ungar, Oren Cass, & Deneen try to polarize workers contra professionals in a culture war, which distracts both classes from polarizing contra our bosses. A labor & democratic movement primarily attending to the needs of workers (but in a subsidiary objective also speaking for professionals), now that is an consummation devoutly to be rewished.

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deneen appears to believe liberalism had the seeds of self-destruction baked into the cake from the very beginning. Over time, Classical Liberalism gave way to Progressive Liberalism. It eventually created a narcissistic power elite certain of their own moral righteousness who scheme to protect their power and material largesse through claiming to be champions of the oppressed. They are moral relativists, with non-stop evolving ideas, who believe they are more moral than your average Joe/Jane. They generally despise the working class and large parts of the general electorate. Whether it's Romney complaining about the "47 percent" or Hillary Clinton denouncing the "basket of deplorables," they don't think very highly of people outside their "class" of global elites. The author critiques this class of elites and their evolving ideas using insights from a variety of thinkers (i.e. Marx, Burke, Disraeli). He offers some possible ways for the West to work its way out of the ideological mess it is now in. He argues for an Aristopopulism using Machiavellian means. I'm skeptical of it working. Western nihilism with all its attendant ideological contradictions is deeply ingrained in the culture. Achieving a "common good" that is agreed upon by "average people" and the elites will be difficult. Still, the book is worth reading.