Political Actors

Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future is really three books sewn together. Together, they confront the discontents of our era, suggest a framework for how we should think about it, and propose what exactly should be done. The first book is a success, the second an interesting (if incomplete) account, and the third curiously lacking. Recognizing what is substantial in Regime Change helps us to understand where American postliberalism sits today. And paying attention to what remains absent or underexplored enlightens us to the full scope of the intellectual challenges—and, one hopes, opportunities—for generations of postliberals to come.

The first book of Regime Change is easily digestible, fluently summarizing the last six years of critical debate about modern American society and its politics through what we might call the postliberal critique of contemporary life in the modern West. That is, a mix of economic precarity, social atomization, societal disorder, political misrule, and ideological extremism under the nation’s current elite class. Deneen states the challenge in a striking way: “We are witness to the emergence of a perverse combination of the new and older forms of tyranny: neither the raw imposition of [the] power of [the] few resulting in the misery of many, nor the soft despotism of a paternalistic state that keeps its citizens in a state of permanent childishness, but the forced imposition of radical expressivism upon the population by the power elite.”

The second book sketches a highly abstracted theory of politics and the ideologies that shape it. He makes the argument that both classical and progressive liberalism are variations on a form of disembedded elitism in service to revolutionary social and economic agendas—which in either case leads to the perpetual undermining of order, tradition, continuity, and stability. Here, Deneen develops the case for returning to a classically-inspired regime format he terms the “mixed regime” or “mixed constitution,” wherein the honorable virtues of a well-formed elite are blended with the common-sense virtues of the masses to achieve a broad, common-good approach to political order. He also coins a neologism for his proposed movement to get there: “aristopopulism.”

The third book proposes a series of practical steps to implement such a postliberal regime. Deneen intends these proposals to help fix the problems identified in the first book and to put into effect the “mixed regime” structure drawn up in the second. Here we find mundane solutions, such as increasing the size of the House of Representatives to one thousand members and improving and expanding vocational training as an alternative to college education, as well as larger approaches to “integrate” religion, community, inter-ethnic comity, and other parts of American society back into a stable model of governance. This third book also contains the core, radical-revolutionary assertion of the work overall: that all this can only be accomplished through “the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism,” and one that will be achieved by “Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends.”

This is the reason for the book’s intentionally provocative title. Deneen is ultimately advocating for the reconstruction of the current political, economic, and social strata that form and govern our polity’s regime. “The answer is not the elimination of the elite,” Deneen writes, “but its replacement with a better set of elites.”

While Deneen’s case for discontent is quite strong, his marriage of the conceptually abstract to the politically practical is simultaneously too specific and not nearly fleshed out enough. We are faced with a vision in which a dominating “party of progress” must be defeated by an as-yet-unformed “party of conservatism,” in a no-holds barred contest for political supremacy, while leaving our institutions largely intact (just re-populated and re-oriented) and our form of government the same, yet somehow better. There is both a theory of the problem and a hopeful vista of the future settlement, but the theory of victory—the getting from point A to point B part—is left largely to the reader to divine.

One could spend a great deal of time on the diagnostic parts of this work, but frankly this is well-covered ground, both by Deneen and his fellow postliberal intellectuals, alongside the various conservative, liberal, and left-wing interlocutors who so often criticize them. As for its call to form a new cadre of responsible, postliberal elites, any discussion would be purely hypothetical. After all, true cadre-building is properly measured in generations. For me, the most interesting part of Regime Change was rather its major claim about political regime itself. Yet even here, while Deneen makes thought-provoking points, he doesn’t advance the debate as much as he intends.

Deneen seeks a systematic approach to regime, characterizing it in a way familiar to political theorists and social scientists as a matrix of the governing and governance-influencing elite who largely determine the rules of the political, economic, and social order. By taking direction from the classical tradition—most notably Aristotle, Polybius, and Aquinas—we are given the standard six-part schema of regimes: a triad of just political orders typified as monarchy/aristocracy/polity (the last being the “mixed regime”) and their negative inverse of tyranny/oligarchy/democracy. In a refreshing move relative to some postliberal discussions, Deneen ignores the call of monarchy to focus his efforts on assessing why exactly the virtuous mixing of aristocracy and democracy is an optimal solution to the problem of political rule—and why we don’t have it. In doing so, he takes an interpretation of the classical tradition that one might understandably conflate with a Marxist lens (although not a Marxist solution), dividing all political orders into a tilting class balance between a unitary elite and a vast commons.

This reduction of all politics to ever-opposed classes leads to a search for a normative third type, in which the classes are blended together (not simply balanced against each other) such that their respective virtues are re-inforced and their vices checked. Coupled with a conceptual assessment of four primary modern ideologies and their view on the relations between the classes—classical liberalism, progressive liberalism, Marxism, and postliberalism—we see why changing the nature of the regime itself is so vital in the author’s view.

For Deneen, postliberal politics is a kind of common good–oriented paternalism, in which an elite mindful of its fellow countrymen governs in their name as much as in their own exclusive interests. At least so much as the people themselves fit with the socially right, economically left coalition in the proposed “party of conservatism,” of course. Of all options on the table, only this postliberal entry in the two-by-two schema of possible ideological regimes marries a non-revolutionary elite with a non-revolutionary people—although in Deneen’s own account it may require potentially revolutionary means to get there.

Deneen’s reliance on classical concepts has important merit, not least in recovering categories that can open eyes to the ways in which power is exercised, remind us that ruling elites are inevitable, and highlight the importance of embedding the governing class into the quotidian networks, lifeways, and concerns of the governed. But relying on class-based concepts also occludes the many other ways we speak about regime today. Not least is the fact that the phrase “regime change” itself usually means the violent overthrow of the sitting government. On a straight reading, this is not what Deneen advocates for, but eschewing overthrow or hard constitutional revision means that we are left with regime change by a volunteered abdication (unlikely, given that our regime is repeatedly characterized as “tyrannical”) or through the gradual remaking of all elite-producing institutions through partial reforms and the sustained development of future generations of motivated postliberal youth.

This leaves the argument that develops over books two and three oddly diminished. The only thing truly different about Deneen’s superior postliberal regime is that it is populated by the right people, who also are conveniently more integrated with the nation as it is. There is very little constitutional or structural change envisioned here, and should we get a miraculous capture of America’s elite heights by a postliberal cadre of the future, they would be using the same tools: a geographically elected Congress, a national president, an elitist court system, regional federalism, and an economy still plausibly dominated by bureaucratized corporate entities with advantages over lobbying and interest articulation.

Is this actually conducive to sustaining a mixed constitution headed by an aristopopulist ruling elite? Given Deneen’s claims about the desultory state of the Republic, and his winking Leninist questions about “What Is To Be Done?” many readers may be understandably frustrated. One has to wonder why so few changes are really necessary to get the appropriate postliberal outcome. Would Aristotle, Polybius, or Aquinas really agree that national service, vocational training, and a larger House are all that is necessary for ensuring just government?

One reason the proposals seem unfinished is that Deneen ultimately cannot escape a fairly narrow mainstream canon of Anglo-American political-philosophical thought, albeit with important classical inspiration. Despite his criticisms, Deneen still relies on this tradition, and it is not known for its alignment with current postliberal ideas. Especially if one insists on recourse mostly to Burke, Tocqueville, and Disraeli as friendly antecedents, all of which can be as readily characterized as progenitors of a form of liberal conservatism that has produced the “right-liberalism” he otherwise castigates so thoroughly.

Coloring within the lines of the received Anglo-American tradition also brings out tensions in Deneen’s suggestions regarding actual political institutions. Historically, our form of representative government has often been cited by both proponents and detractors as being fundamentally “liberal,” with electoral and judicial entities strongly contoured around individualism and autonomous rights. This, of course, was the great debate about parliamentarism in continental Europe from the late nineteenth century through the interwar period. Europeans solved this through civil strife, authoritarianism, war, civilizational disaster, and then social and Christian democratic structures that look quite different from America today. This historical experience probably matters to postliberal thought and its relation to regime, but it is nowhere to be found here.

There are, of course, sources beyond the preferred canon within the English-speaking world that could be explored. But they are plausibly foreclosed due to Deneen’s rejection of nationalism and ethnic specificity, authoritarianism, actual historical aristocracy, or Marxist-influenced reactionary twentieth-century thought. Hamiltonianism, American developmental Whig-nationalism, the Southern Agrarians, Thomas Carlyle, the deeper bench of British Toryism, both “liberal” and liberal-critical American Catholics such as Orestes Brownson, Bishop Bernard McQuaid, Bishop John Ireland, Venerable Fulton Sheen, and many others could all be brought to bear in a postliberal discussion of regime, aristocratic values, the integration of virtues through religious tradition, and the blending of high and low cultures. But they are either absent or mentioned largely in passing—and would perhaps be difficult to engage with without ruffling more feathers than Deneen would like. It is not clear that such a book would be more coherent, for what it’s worth, but without going further afield what we get in Regime Change hardly approaches its radical ambitions, let alone a promise of regime change.

In truth, what is missing here is what has remained mostly missing across the spectrum of current postliberal thought: a comparative and empirical approach attentive to actually existing political regimes that look like what postliberalism proposes. If the Anglophone world is and has long been dominated by an all-encompassing liberalism (see, for example, Deneen 2018), taking a good look outside is necessary. Just to start, there is a tremendous corpus of theoretical, ideological, and practical lessons that can be taken from continental Europe or Latin America and mined for intellectual resources. And the inspired postliberal could easily find examples of notable alternatives far beyond those as well.

We can be concrete in our comparative cue-taking here. For example, much of the substance of practical postliberalism as suggested by Deneen—economic statism, governing elite small-c conservatism, benevolent paternalism, and social moderation—could easily be sourced to Gaullist France or the older iterations of Christian-Democratic West Germany or Italy. These were all democracies that managed—for a time, at least—to produce something that seems akin to Deneen’s account of a more just regime.

Another course would be to look at the rich tradition of twentieth-century corporatism—that is, hierarchical institutions connecting state and society tied to professions and class groups which articulate their interests to and within the government as a collective body, rather than as individuals or autonomous entities. This informed both authoritarian and democratic experiments in Europe and Latin America and has an American analogue in F.D.R.’s New Deal. Variations on corporatism exist in social democracies today as well as the Christian (or national) democracies of the recent past, so it really is a widely followed alternative to the Anglo-American model that should be taken seriously by any postliberal thinker today.

Similarly, lessons on socially oriented elitism from Catholic traditions in the Spanish-speaking world and Ireland, or from the famously embedded and community-oriented elites of Japan or South Korea, would be useful examples in both the positive and negative. Systems within which elites are integrated into a political-economic governing model, rather than engaging in adversarial competition, have genuinely been tried before. Singapore also comes to mind with authoritative, communitarian social policies (albeit with liberal economic ones) that might be juxtaposed productively in comparative perspective for aspiring postliberal theorists. And while Hungary, an example of a modern version of continental “national conservatism,” is given an appropriate shout-out, the various lonstanding traditions of national-patriotic communitarianism and locally embedded elitism in Eastern Europe run far deeper than just a kind mention of assertive, conservative family policy.

If you had told me ten years ago that I would be reading a book on “regime change” by a conservative Catholic academic, it simply would not have computed. I imagine the same could be said of many others who have opened Regime Change. Nevertheless, here we are. Deneen’s intellectual journey has been an interesting—and important—one to travel along with. And he has perhaps gone about as far as the mainstream Anglo-American tradition can go in a postliberal direction. It may take new generations of discontented intellectuals to bring the conversation further, with more specificity, and more realism about what exactly is on offer and what a real postliberal regime might look like.