Tristan’s Reviews > Why Liberalism Failed > Status Update
Tristan
is on page 130 of 248
"the great financial crisis was caused by the financial equivalent of hookup culture" is an all-timer why did I never hear about this. also I think Deneen maybe thinks you shouldn't be gay.
— Aug 20, 2026 02:36AM
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Tristan’s Previous Updates
Tristan
is on page 186 of 248
In which we get an eye-rollingly generic critique of the humanities in the university, & also a kind of fun account accusing American liberal democracy's of having built-in mechanism for inhibiting the people's ability and willingness to Do Democracy, & continuity in this between the Founders and the New Deal Progressives.
— Aug 22, 2026 05:45AM
Tristan
is on page 66 of 248
so far aggressively fine & inoffensive (imo lots of the critiques read like something your woke anthropology prof would say) and definitely cogent at points but hysterical that for a while we were all supposed to pretend that this kind of catholic communitarianism & classicist virtue theory had anything to do with like Trump etc. other than the support of the writers
— Aug 18, 2026 03:44PM
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Patrick
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Aug 20, 2026 08:47AM
What does that even mean lol
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Patrick wrote: "What does that even mean lol""The mortgage industry rested upon the financial equivalent of college "hookups," random encounters of strangers in which appetites were sated without any care for the consequences for the wider community."
This immediately follows a section in which, without any apparent irony, he cites the head of JP Morgan in 1928 (Thomas Lamont) as saying that "the community as a whole demands of the banker that he shall be an honest observer of conditions about him." So sad that we have lost the virtuous self-regulation and community oriented restraint of 1920s investment bankers.
The basic argumentative structure is: disembedding of individuals from 'situated norms' leads to harms of excess which leads to calls for state intervention.
I guess that's less objectionable than I expected? But still weird, wouldn't have expected a catholic conservative to have advocated for the state's capacity to instantiate substantive norms (morals?) in the public sphere.
Patrick wrote: "I guess that's less objectionable than I expected? But still weird, wouldn't have expected a catholic conservative to have advocated for the state's capacity to instantiate substantive norms (moral..."If I'm reading you right I think my framing of the structure was ambiguous, what I mean to say is that the harms of excess lead to calls for state intervention by liberals, i.e. liberalism's individualism justifies its own statist-expansionary agenda. Deneen is (at least in this book, though maybe not elsewhere?) against this
Ohhhhh okay. I get u. Ur classic conservative silliness then.