US postliberalism doesn’t understand the nature of the crisis it has identified.
Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, London: Penguin, 2023. Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It, New York: Forum Books, 2023. Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, New York: Random House, 2023.
The waning of the United States’s dominance in the world is increasingly apparent, as is the fear it is coming apart as a society. A series of strategic debacles have shattered the illusion of it as unchallengeable force, while bestselling books and films openly canvas the idea of an impending ‘civil war’ between progressive and conservative parts of the nation. This sense of decline extends beyond the United States to the rest of the West—the precarious condition of the EU and post-Brexit Britain. Even in Australia there’s anxious talk of ‘social cohesion’. All this suggests the project of globalised free trade, shaped by the civilised and liberal ‘values’ of the West, has stalled. If parts of the Left have been saying this for some time, others, including progressives and the ‘woke’, have concentrated on identity politics and by and large been willing to leave corporate capitalism and geopolitics untouched. By way of response, conservatives have mocked identity politics while being equally content to leave larger structures alone, each side mirroring the other.
Within the United States itself, in the past two years there has been much talk by critical intellectuals from various camps of breaking the ‘zombified’ exchange of left-right politics. Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari rethink the core assumptions that have dominated conservative politics for decades, breaking ranks with the fusion of free markets and religious conservatism that has formed the mainstay of the Right. In doing so, they advocate a form of what they claim to be pro-worker conservatism that targets a working class disenchanted with progressive politics. By contrast, Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap argues for reasserting liberal democracy over an identity politics that has abandoned long-held principles such as free speech and expression. In departing from standard positions, these books have generated praise from traditional opponents. Deneen and Ahmari have had positive reviews from left-leaning commentators, while Mounk’s critique of identity politics coming from the liberal Left has been well received by many conservatives.
In nearly all of these books, the failure of the ‘elites’ is held up as a key driver of contemporary decline. For Deneen, the elites promote the idea of a hegemonic ‘liberalism’ which fosters illusions about human progress and promotes unfettered freedom while undermining the conditions for social life. For Ahmari, the elites whose ideas spawned neoliberal economics, as well as those whose idea of freedom unwittingly supported it, have created whole new regimes of exploitation, surveillance and tyranny for the worker. Mounk also focuses on elites, but in contrast sees them—insofar as they pursue identity-based politics—as undermining the liberal foundation of democratic society and sabotaging the political projects they originally sprang from through misunderstanding the ideas of postmodern thinkers. In all of these versions, however, the failure or betrayal of the elites—whether the managerial class, woke identarians or corporate neoliberals—is crucial to their diagnosis of the decaying social fabric.
This diagnosis is both overstated and undertheorised, in the sense that the elites form part of a larger material transformation that none of these authors has adequately grasped. Even if one were to seriously entertain their desire to restore traditional social or economic hierarchies, or return to a robust liberalism, they are unlikely to get far because of this shortcoming. Similarly, all three books give excessive weight to ideas—chiefly, liberalism and postmodernism—rather than the material structures and conditions through which those ideas arose, and which condition social and cultural changes more than the ideas do themselves. Beyond this lies the question of what these calls for regime change—for correcting the balance of employer-worker power relations and/or the return to the principles that govern liberal democracy—might actually mean in the current situation, and whether they could even redress the social and cultural atrophy all writers here so keenly identify.
Patrick Deneen’s 2016 book Why Liberalism Failed, complete with endorsement from Barack Obama, became influential in the wake of Trump’s election. Deneen argued that liberalism contained its own capacity for destruction, and that its commitment to individual autonomy led not to more freedom, but the opposite—alienation, social decay, the loss of value and the like. Regime Change extends this idea, abandoning the possibility that conservative politics can be successful within any kind of liberal framework. Deneen’s portrayal in Regime Change of a failed America of poverty, drug addiction, unemployment, failed marriages, race riots and so on, is not a typical conservative screed but one alert to context, in which the ravages of free market economics, technology, consumerism and the like replace the usual victim-blaming.
However, the book’s diagnosis of social and cultural decline relies too much on a sweeping denunciation of liberalism as the primary cause of social and cultural atrophy. Deneen’s use of ‘regime’ to describe liberalism is indicative: regimes are usually despotic or authoritarian, and while one might agree with Deneen that things are falling apart, he hangs too much on liberalism as a philosophical idea that once taken root became the primary cause of Western decline. In Regime Change, all variations of liberal thought, all differences between liberal philosophers, are collapsed into a broad denunciation of an idea that goes back hundreds of years, from Bacon to Hobbes to John Stuart Mill all the way through to today’s woke elites. Deneen claims liberalism’s focus on individual rights and belief in historical progress—values projected by a corrupt set of elites—is only possible thanks to an antipathy towards nature, tradition, custom, authority, place and community, and in this he aligns with someone like John Gray in The New Leviathans in seeing the illusion of liberal freedom as being not just misguided but wholly destructive. A combination of economic liberalism—the embrace of free markets that erode traditional ways of work and life—and social liberalism with its emphasis on individual freedom and moral perfection being achieved though the bypassing of custom and tradition has resulted in widespread poverty, uprootedness, alienation and moral decay. The liberal ‘ethic’ of freedom culminates in the destruction of the environment via ceaseless consumption, and of the human subject through radical new technologies that capture the mind and vandalise the body and the social order.
In this account, that corruption caused by liberalism as a philosophy is synonymous with modernity itself. It is a dialectic of Enlightenment without the dialectic. Deneen’s conservatism is thrown into contradiction because his analysis leaves little to conserve. Having been tainted by liberalism, he has little choice to move away from his more grounded descriptions of social decline to an airier framework for reconstruction. Here he bypasses modernity altogether and draws on classical philosophy and traditional, largely Catholic religion in order to create a new relationship between the elites and masses. Instead of actually conserving, Deneen argues for a comprehensive reconstruction of values aimed not at freedom but at the ‘common good’. He describes his antiliberal vision:
to constitute a political and social order worth conserving, something revolutionary must first take place: the priority of the liberal progressive agenda must be displaced for one that seeks stability, order, and continuity.
Deneen’s dystopian description of modern society and culture fuses with a vague idealism—an idea of order in which a newly installed elite and the masses mutually enforce each other—as opposed to liberalism which drives them apart. He describes the masses in ahistorical terms: they are ‘grounded in the realities of a world of limits’ and exhibit ‘frugality, inventiveness, craft, common sense, gratitude for small blessings, and, often, stoic cheerfulness even in the face of penury and suffering’. Contra liberalism, which undermines these qualities, Deneen aims to foster this innate conservatism. He calls this new arrangement ‘aristopopulism’—a more balanced arrangement in which virtuous elites actively defend the cultural traditions of the common people. This hubristic faith that a postreligious society will accept the rule of gentle knights arises from this and other books’ master error: that our current ungrounding is a product of ideas alone.
Thus while one might agree with Deneen’s description of the negative effects of ungrounding, his analysis falls well short of accounting for how all this came to be. Moreover, he lacks any kind of reflexivity with respect to the changes he describes. To be sure, there are all sorts of precarity, instability and alienation in techno-modernity, but there are also forms of emancipation that are not purely destructive: the overcoming of parochialism and prejudice, the possibility of a universal ethic and so on. Deneen’s idealised masses, stuck for eternity in traditional pattens, do have this dimension available to them. Indeed, the fact that the majority of citizens in Western countries have generally adopted broad liberal ideas on reproductive rights, gay marriage and the like mean that the masses do not match the description Deneen attributes to them. The ‘lifting-out’ of people from their established settings, the ‘choice’ offered though consumerism and so on predispose the subject to a form of openness that makes such changes in culture acceptable. The masses have not been misled by liberals so much as they have been enmeshed in new ways of living, working, consuming and so on, and this frames a different sort of worldview. The ‘masses’ Deneen idealises are likely to be working several jobs in the service economy, streaming TV and browsing social media than they are to be bound by the natural rhythms of another age.
Amidst all of this it is significant that Deneen’s concrete proposals—cancelling student loans for essential workers, increasing worker participation in corporate governance, moving government departments to poor and rural areas and so on—are so meagre.
While some on the Left have seen the postliberal project as something positive because, unlike the liberal abandonment of the working class, it at least addresses some of the problems of workers and those in rural and poor regions, it is not what it seems. Postliberals do not want to just take a bit of this from the Left and this from the Right to create a reheated liberal variant. Rather, Deneen argues for something more comprehensive: ‘The raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism’. If postliberals have expressed dismay with Trump, they are excited by the space he occupies, hoping to exploit the perceived illegitimacy of mainstream liberal democracy. Expressing admiration for autocratic Hungary, they hope to enact this on a larger front—to expand, in Deneen’s phrase, ‘the authoritative claims of the village’ to a national scale. When Deneen states a number of times that what is required is ‘Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends’, he aligns with what many predict might occur in a second Trump term: executive control over public servants and direct intervention in government, universities, media and business. DeSantis on a bigger stage.
If Regime Change takes a culturalist approach to reclaim the working class and challenge the hegemony of liberal elites, Sohrab Ahmari, Deneen’s postliberal colleague, mounts an attack on neoliberal economics in Tyranny Inc. Ahmari is one of the founders of Compact magazine, a publication that serves as a meeting ground between left and right populism. In a similar vein, Tyranny Inc. taps into the discontent that led to the election of Trump, seeing opportunity in the reversal of political alignment of Democrat and Republican voters. Ahmari writes:
This book was conceived on election night 2020. The outcome was still murky, but one thing was clear: Republicans had widened their appeal among voters without college degrees and those doing tangible forms of labor. Democrats, meanwhile, had emerged as the party of Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the professional classes.
The ‘tyranny’ of the title is the condition faced by the majority of employees when working in the private and corporate sector. If the Right once railed against the tyranny of big government in favour of private business, Ahmari recognises that the private sector is now where tyranny lies due to unrestrained corporate capitalism and the laws that enable it.
Previously, Ahmari had been a culture warrior very much in the vein of Deneen, Vermuele and others. He was regarded as the first to publicly denounce ‘drag queen story hour’, and his 2019 article ‘Against David Frenchism’ attacked the complacency of conservatives such as French who were too accepting of the modern liberal order and whose strategy to carve out a small space for religious conservatism was insufficient. In sharp contrast, Ahmari urged on the culture war, attacking enemies rather than accommodating them.
Tyranny Inc. came as something of a surprise, firstly in that Ahmari has largely dropped the cultural frame and secondly in that a conservative would prescribe an end to dogmatic market fundamentalism. Early in the book he describes the outrageous situation of a single mother forced to take up shifts assigned at the last minute by her boss and thus caught in an impossible choice between keeping her job and looking after her child. Previously, he would have been more likely to criticise the situation of being a single mother, but here the focus is on her economic exploitation.
Ahmari details numerous examples of worker disempowerment and humiliation by corporations and private companies that exploit the law to keep employees in a precarious state, from union-busting to the ways in which private capital forces workers into conditions they cannot bargain their way out of. Beyond this, the book details the use of private capital to destroy industries though corporate raiding—he is particularly eloquent on the destruction of journalism, where information is everywhere but not the kind of information workers or communities need to make decisions—and finally the privatisation of public goods like medical services and firefighters.
Both sides of traditional politics are to blame for this situation. ‘Lifestyle leftists’ unwittingly aid big business by gaining ‘symbolic victories’ over speech codes and championing corporate diversity, overlooking how bosses undermine unions and keep down wages, while conservatives accept ‘a downright ludicrous politics centered on preaching timeless virtues’ that does nothing ‘to alter the fundamental balance of power between corporations and the rest of us’.
Yet Ahmari is no Marxist. Instead, he argues for a better balance between capital and labour—something not dissimilar to Deneen’s conservative hierarchy, but with economics instead of culture. Ahmari is more of a ‘coercion realist’, claiming that there will always be some sort of coercion in society, it’s just that the balance has got out of whack. This imbalance is revealed via a comparison of the ‘golden age’ of capitalism—the 1950s and the New Deal—with the current era of neoliberalism. For Ahmari the New Deal era of ‘socially managed capitalism’ produced ‘a generally happy time of broad prosperity’. Unfortunately, this was replaced by what Ahmari’s calls the ‘neoliberal counterpunch’, where a ‘small group of disgruntled intellectuals’ in the 1970s took advantage of a series of crises to convince governments that deregulation, privatisation and small government were the means to economic prosperity. As a response, Ahmari calls for a restoration of the socially managed market. Dismantling the neoliberal order, he contends, would require ‘a labor market in which most sectors are unionized’ and a higher minimum wage. These are the minimum conditions for effecting any countervailing power.
Putting aside any question of whether these conditions would be sufficient to restore some degree of power and dignity to workers—and it’s arguably still better than what’s offered by Democrats—the simplistic contrast between the golden age of the New Deal and the neoliberalism of today is flawed. Ahmari largely ignores the highly specific conditions that led to the ‘golden age’ of the 50s and the New Deal.
These conditions no longer exist. Ahmari is trying to recreate industrial labour conditions in a postindustrial age. The United States faces competition from a renewed Europe and Asia. The nature of work has changed, shifting to a large degree from manual labour to fragmented knowledge and service work. Automation and surveillance have created new forms of tyranny and precarity. Ahmari’s aim to restore the ‘balance’ of coercion similar to the 1950s would require much more to overcome the tyranny of contemporary global capitalism.
Perhaps inevitably, then, he argues that Trump ‘alone offers Americans a chance to confront and chasten their failed elites’, and expresses hope that he will be reelected. Like Deneen, he is insouciant about how a postliberal executive authoritarianism might go awry. But as with Deneen, the lack of striking solutions out of the ordinary run of politics is evidence that the problem is not with the identification of social problems, but with their utter misdiagnosis.
Deneen and Ahmari are joined in this by Yascha Mounk. As a good liberal, Yascha Mounk is horrified by Trump and all things associated with his possible return. Mounk’s previous books criticised the far-right turn in US; in The Identity Trap he shifts focus and targets the Left’s turn toward identity politics, regarding its narrow focus upon race, sex and gender as an unhelpful deviation from the liberal democratic framework that once encompassed them without seeing identities as ends in themselves. The consequence is a narrowing of politics, forever divided as identity groups compete with each other, and a ‘trap’ in the way the demands of identity project a victim mentality and promote internecine conflict between groups. The reification of identity leads to powerlessness to the extent that various identity groups cannot or will not combine toward a larger political struggle. Mounk has received favourable coverage for exposing the dead end of identity politics, though he is hardly breaking new ground. Yet though his target of elites is the same as Ahmari’s and Deneen’s, The Identity Trap is their polar opposite.
Though Mounk’s critique of the excesses of identity politics, or what he calls the ‘identity-synthesis’ is superficially appealing—who hasn’t read about or experienced some absurd claim about cultural appropriation or some call for cancellation over a trivial comment, or been frustrated by the self-sabotaging or frivolous nature of many identity-based grievances?—the analysis is unsatisfying for a number of reasons. If this was the takedown of identity politics you were looking for, keep looking.
For a start, Mounk provides no indication of how far identity politics has actually spread across US and other cultures. We all know that its discourses are to be found in education and corporate policy, and all over the internet. But Mounk doesn’t indicate whether all this is a passing phenomenon, a small part of workplace policy, or simply an empty virtue signalling that for the most part is ignored. Instead his approach is to relate a number of anecdotes—egregious social media wars, corporate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies and the like—and imply that these are part of a larger pattern. For example, the book relates how Coca-Cola offers training to employees that advises them to ‘try to be less white’, how an elementary school in Atlanta in 2020 began segregating classes by race on supposedly progressive grounds, and how ‘a critic at the Toronto Star got a small business shut down in the middle of the pandemic for the crime of serving an inauthentic version of pho, the popular Vietnamese soup’. Mounk implies that each of these examples, frequently repeated, is a typical case of identity politics ‘gone mad’, but in fact they often turn out to be isolated instances. The segregation episode occurred in one Atlanta school. In the case of the Vietnamese pho, the battle was more concerned with economic power—a wellness chain potentially driving out a long-established family business. There’s no data in his book to determine the degree to which identity politics is rising or falling; most of Mounk’s examples are taken from 2020, making such a calculation impossible.
In fact, history hasn’t been kind to Mounk’s claims. The pro-Palestinian marches and occupation of campuses act as a rebuttal to Mounk’s thesis: as Richard King notes in his essay in this issue, on campuses now there is a mixture of identities engaged in the Palestinian cause; no one is complaining of cultural appropriation if someone wears the keffiyeh, and the activism is both broad in its demand for the end of Israel settler-colonial violence, and specific in demanding the divestment of universities from economic and military ties to Israel.
Where Mounk does have something in common with these other books is in over-privileging ideas as a causative factor. In tracing the ‘identity-synthesis’ he does a genealogy of sorts, finding its origins in Foucault’s critique of power and rejection of grand narratives, Gayatri Spivak’s strategic essentialism and the intersectional theory developed by Kimberley Crenshaw. From Foucault (and postmodernism), we get a rejection of universal claims to truth and justice, from Spivak strategic essentialism leading to the establishment of racially separate ‘affinity groups’ in many progressive spaces and from Crenshaw’s intersectionality the ultimate impossibility of any outsider being able to understand a different identity. While these theories have been around for decades, several things have occurred, according to Mounk, to make them fuse into today’s identity-synthesis. Firstly, the ideas have been misinterpreted, or used for fundamentally different purposes from what Foucault, Crenshaw and Spivak intended to create the identity struggles we see today. Secondly, social media has allowed these misinterpretations to spread, and finally the rise of Trump ‘accelerated the takeover of the identity synthesis in many elite institutions’.
This may be partially right, but it’s not a sufficient explanation of the mass phenomenon Mounk identifies. Why mention Trump and not COVID? Surely the atmosphere of crisis, lockdowns and so on would play a role in shaping recent culture, in the sense that driving everyone indoors and online would exacerbate the trend in treating the online world as the only reality. It’s also a stretch to claim that not only have the ideas of Foucault, Crenshaw and so on been systematically misinterpreted but that ‘a new generation of scholars succeeded in welding [these] diverse set of influences into one coherent ideology’ (emphasis mine). To the degree to which there is a unifying mechanism behind identity politics, it is not at the level of ideas: the trajectory towards disciplinary fracture, specialisation and so on within universities means that scholars are unlikely to encounter areas outside their narrow purview, and so the notion of a single ideology being forged based on the synthetic misinterpretation of ideas is rather fanciful.
Mounk’s inquiry thus falls foul of the familiar paradox of many such books, which have a loftier take than Ahmari or Deneen. How could the massive, multi-levelled process of postwar social reproduction, if it was so grounded in material reality and the chosen cultural lives of the masses, be so easily overturned in a single generation by the movement of ideas alone—especially those of a few weirdo eggheads in liberal arts colleges? Mounk does not inquire into what material processes caused identities to become a primary focus for people, let alone why contemporary identities are so fragile, subject to textual violation, and in need of being endlessly reconfirmed, kept safe and so on, all of which feeds their destructive politics. He focuses only on the (mis)reception of ideas, and how elites spread them through the political realm. In seeing identity as simply an unfortunate ideology, he, like Deneen and Ahmari, doesn’t explore its conditions of possibility—that is, what has created the situation where identity is reduced to purity and where social and cultural mixing are problematic or even dangerous.
Why should those from a radical and critical position pay attention to these books at all? In their analysis of social decay, postliberals share some ground with what the Left has been saying, as do their solutions involving improving worker rights, limiting corporate power and so on, even if they fall well short of what most of the Left would ask for. Given the refusal of Democrats and labour parties in the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia to do anything meaningful about the material conditions of everyday people, and the niche, if not hypocritical, posturing of many liberal elites, it is tempting to try and find common ground with aspects of postliberal thought. Thus Mounk—because as an entrenched liberal he assumes that there is a pragmatic ‘centre’ from which there are only unfortunate deviations—underplays the role of markets, consumerism, technology and so on in a instituting a change where subjects are less ‘social’, less framed by co-presence, more able to escape the prior rigidities of community and place but also by that token deprived of the grounding they provide and thus condemned to the freedom of perpetually creating and rebuilding performative identities that are by nature fleeting and fragile. At least postliberals see the destructive illusions of freedom in technological and marketised emancipation from the body, co-presence, locality and place. But they mistake this for the fault of liberalism rather than a social-material process. They also mistakenly see this process as primarily a ‘fall’ from an older, more ideal state of being rather than something closer to a dialectical process. Having identified the movement of the intellect as a new mass historical force in its own right, Mounk and other such writers can barely begin to see the ‘meta-shift’ by which the situating and surrounding of class society by a larger process has made possible the new centrality of ideas, identities and culture to contemporary life. They thus offer solutions that are either simple recitations of liberal mantras in the face of a phenomenon enabled by large-scale transformation, something opaque to those trapped within an idealistic liberalism—Mounk suggests we must ‘seek to build a society in which members of every group are valued equally’ and ‘develop greater compassion foreach other’—or more sinister, as in Deneen’s call for a ‘raw assertion’ of first things. Perhaps the greatest danger of the latter is that its one-dimensional analysis would create tyranny arising from frustration at the failure to change anything at all.