Thursday, November 16, 2017

Deneen: The Failure of Liberalism

Happily, Patrick Deneen has authored a new book!!

Unhappily--for Liberals--it critiques their conceits.  And by "Liberals" I mean the "classical" Liberals who have spawned the current (~1900-present) debacle-in-the-making in the USA and elsewhere in the West.

Just a few zingers:

...Whether we concur with Professor Deneen’s final judgments or no, Why Liberalism Failed is a must-read for anyone wishing to contribute to pivotal contemporary debates about religion, politics, law, and ethics. On almost every page can be found some remarkable and provocative quote. “Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.” Thanks to liberalism, “everywhere, at every moment, we are to engage in experiments in living.” In the twenty-first century, “training at dorm parties and the fraternities of one’s college were the ideal preparation for a career in the mortgage bond market, and the financial frat party of Wall Street more generally,” for “the mortgage industry rested upon the financial equivalent of college ‘hookups’.”...

It's a book which, not surprisingly, will please Steve Bannon:

The “Noble Lie” of liberalism is shattering because it continues to be believed and defended by those who benefit from it, while it is increasingly seen as a lie, and not an especially noble one, by the new servant class that liberalism has produced. Discontent is growing among those who are told by their leaders that their policies will benefit them […] liberalism’s apologists regard pervasive discontent, political dysfunction, economic inequality, civic disconnection, and populist rejection as accidental problems disconnected from systemic causes, because their self-deception is generated by enormous reservoirs of self-interest in the maintenance of the present system. This divide will only widen, the crises will become more pronounced, the political duct tape and economic spray paint will increasingly fail to keep the house standing.

And --!!HORRORS!! --it has a few words of comfort for elements of the AltRight:

...The liberal fixation upon indistinguishable rights-bearing individuals is what renders liberalism practically unsustainable and morally incoherent, for such a vision excludes the most critical relationships and dimensions of human life. We are not merely individuals, but are also sons or daughters or parents or siblings, Catholics or Protestants or Jews. Human beings cherish their membership in particular communities, traditions, and nations, and a system that refuses to take such profound commitments into account must in the long run prove dehumanizing. Even as liberalism further “liberates” individuals into increasingly formless, meaningless, and narcissistic isolation, it ignores “a deeper freedom, the freedom of intergenerational connections with the world and one another.”...

In other words, "multi-culti" is pure bullshit, and poisonous to any coherent society.

Damn glad to see the book.  Put it on your Christmas list!

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