Regime Change by Patrick Deneen

Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future
By Patrick Deneen
Sentinel, 2023

If you didn't know Patrick Deneen is professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, you could discern from his out-of-control italics usage, in his new book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, that he at least has the pretensions of a public intellectual. You might, therefore, also think he would have cast opposing views in their strongest terms before carefully, and in detail, posing his own arguments with an alternative. But apparently time is too short for this scholar to stop and scrutinize his madcap premises or reliably define terms (like all bad political theorists). He has a new order in mind.

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

As is always the case with right-wing demagogues, Deneen seems to think society tripped up with the discarding of religious dogma and the flowering of empiricism, reason, and liberty:

Liberalism was the modernist political philosophy that at once embraced the Enlightenment faith in progress and rejected the long-standing endorsement of “mixed” constitutions. Classical liberalism stressed the paramount goal of economic progress. . .which, it was hoped, would eclipse spiritual, cultural, or transcendent aspirations. Progressive liberalism retained classical liberalism’s endorsement of material comfort, but added a belief in moral progress that accompanied humanity’s material advance.

So the two liberal parties, “believed progress was the means of overcoming the ancient division between the classes” and . . . effectively combined to ensure the prevention of a dedicated “people’s party” that would oppose progressivism in both the economic and social domains. The liberal fear of the demos resulted in a political order that was at its foundations, dedicated to the rule of more progressive elites over the threatening demos. . .

Yes, the “threatening demos,” for whom “the consequences of unfettered progress are no longer acceptable” (his gratuitous italics) and which seeks “stability, order, continuity, and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future.” This, in brief, is why we need regime change, “the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order.”

On the problem of elites, so much of this is Willmoore Kendall and C. Wright Mills with the subtly and rigor taken out. An elite class with a common worldview, moving “the main levers of social, political, and economic control in its main institutions” (Deneen’s words), that sees itself as above society and works to maintain itself, can be found better in Mills’ The Power Elite (also a title of a chapter in Deneen’s book, though the author is never mentioned) and Kendall’s (also never mentioned) The Conservative Affirmation (Deneen’s work sounds very much like Daniel McCarthy’s introduction to that book, and many of his arguments are similar to Kendall’s. Even more compatible is a lecture Kendall gave in Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, on the “layman–expert dilemma,” as detailed in Christopher Owen’s biography Heaven Can Indeed Fall).

While there is something to this, what is never asked is: why should there be a problem between “the few” and “the many”? When precisely is there a dilemma between elites and laymen? For Deneen, the elites are the “laptop class” – Richard Florida’s creative class – whose skills “consist of the manipulation of abstract data, often financial manipulation, risk management, cost-benefit analyses, actuarial calculations, ‘consultation’ for efficiency maximization, and the like.” That’s quite a lot. Are CPAs really neo-aristocrats ruling over you?

Obviously not. “The few” and “the many” are vapid categories to be filled in however you please (that’s the appeal); numerical differences, however you taxonomize, do not inherently imply disharmony. In fact, for the most part, the average person’s relationship with the creative class is likely to be professional, non-political, and mutually beneficial. What matters is the nature of the patterns of our relationships. You can drop your financial advisor like a bag of rocks if they go ‘woke’ and stop giving a return. Nobody is forcing you to hand over money each month to the Walt Disney Company, and nobody tased you into the Target clothing aisle. Capitalists can go as conservative, liberal, Liberal, progressive, woke, populist or elitist as they want: they still must sing for their supper.

Discord becomes, rather, a most pressing issue in relationships from which we cannot back out. But this distinction is not made by Deneen. And, even if it were, it wouldn’t make a difference because he would still come down square on the side of conservative statism. He knows his tradition is “less dominant” and so argues for:

. . .a “mixing” that shatters the blindered consensus of the elite. . .that must begin with the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors. . .[and] 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.

Which institutions specifically? Well, after first providing a range of examples he comes right out with it at the end of chapter 2: “every human institution.” That is, “[T]he raw assertion of Political power” in “every human institution.”

And that’s the whole game, isn’t it? Deneen can gas on about the wisdom of the people, Aristopopulism, mixed constitutions, and common-good conservatism in all the syntactically challenged italicized sentences he wishes. This whole scheme amounts to the massive and monstrous application of state violence coordinated by a new elite according to Patrick Deneen.

In detail he calls it “the application of Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” (an ironic thing for him to bold and italicize) which involves a spread of possibilities from a service requirement, the “dismantling of. . .[powerful economic] institutions,” and to the reinstitution of “the ethos and kinds of policies once pursued by Christian Democrats.” (He also refers to “the natural family” and, multiple times, to “marriage between two homosexuals”).

After all this, Deneen’s reference to liberalism as “pervasive, and invasive progressive tyranny” becomes rather laughable.

In sum: It's easy to demonstrate what’s wrong with his claims about that “monolithic” liberalism. His bad writing is inflicted in the reading. The smallness of what’s called The New Right is obvious insofar as the demos he goes on so much about has never heard of it. But in our increasingly illiberal time this bad book must be taken seriously. It is a philosophy of anti-progress and anti-freedom. It is a message to “the people” from a courier who eyes the liberal order with the impatience of a Jacobin, but in its stead desires new elite enforcing state and religious edicts at the point of a bayonet. Regime Change, in short, seeks a regime according to Patrick Deneen.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.