Democracy and Elitism on the Left and Right

REVIEW ESSAY
Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future
by Patrick J. Deneen
Sentinel, 2023, 284 pages

“They’re not all crypto-fascists and right-wing nut jobs,” comments Kendall Roy, the scion of his late father’s media empire on the show Succession, the night before he and his kid brother enthrone a politician answering to that description as America’s newest president. “We also have some venture capital Dems and centrist ghouls. Dad’s ideological range was . . . wide.”

So was the ideological range of the Republican Party over the last fifty years. And so it still is. Nevertheless, the neoliberals within the Republican coalition exerted outsized control for a long time. Some intellectuals want to change that. But in these early days of trying, they are already diverging from one another. That is what is most interesting about Patrick J. Deneen’s sulfurous Regime Change: Toward a Post-liberal Future—along with a single point he makes about the need for a succession of old neoliberal elites toward new ones, although it turns out that even this point has to be rescued from the wreckage of Deneen’s enterprise and reconfigured in the most radical ways.

Deneen enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame because the publica­tion of his bestselling Why Liberalism Failed (2018) coincided with Donald Trump’s election. It received attention across the political spec­trum as a diagnosis of what went wrong—even though its content would have been familiar from sampling any episode of intellectual reaction over two hundred years. Scapegoating René Descartes for the dissolution of the premodern metaphysical order, burning John Locke in effigy for the capitalist business cycle, blaming John Stuart Mill as the first hippie relativist—all of it had been said before, with the difference that American liberals blindsided by the electoral toll of neoliberalism were briefly open to taking it seriously.¹

Deneen’s new book has him falling into line behind Harvard jurist Adrian Vermeule, who criticized Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed in these pages for not being reactionary enough.² Deneen now heeds Ver­meule’s more aggressive call to displace the current “regime” rather than flee it or opt out of it. Deneen’s many other reviewers have previously indicted the farrago of anti-relativist and anti-“woke” memes the book offers as warmed-over Kulturkritik, and there is no need to repeat their withering verdict here. No wonder Regime Change has flopped relative to its author’s prior effort: it offers the wrong ideas for the wrong time. But Deneen is right to suspect that more thinking is required—even on the left—about how to reconfigure elite rule.

For Deneen is, of course, on firm ground in inveighing against elite misrule in contemporary societies. Though the New Right is a latecomer to it, it is entirely proper to denounce the neoliberalism that the ruling classes have inflicted on American society in the last half century (to speak only of one country, as Deneen mostly does). And he is also cor­rect to suppose that elite rule is not going to be washed away anytime soon. Where Deneen goes badly awry is not just in his assortment of right-wing talking points, but also in how he thinks about the past of elite rule and in his defense of something he calls “aristopopulism” in response.

Blinded by the Right

It used to be conventional wisdom that the Far Right was quarantined in American history after 1945. Now it seems more important that it never truly died. Just as Democrats had done before realignment in the second half of the twentieth century, Republicans from the days of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon on dog whistled to a far-right portion of their coalition they could never entirely disavow. Even so, the postwar Right in the United States did generally follow National Review writer Frank Meyer’s prescription of “fusion,” calling for an alliance of fiscal conservatives and market fundamentalists with Christian and other so­cial conservatives, including the Far Right. Religious conservatives, along with other elements of the coalition, were expected to show up at the polls and vote for economically libertarian policies. It was an extremely raw deal for everyone other than the neoliberal funders and leaders of the Republican coalition, and it is shocking in retrospect that a reckoning was delayed so long. There is no doubt that a new partisan formation is needed to knit together Americans currently caught on different sides of neoliberal gridlock. But it is still far too early to say that fusionism has broken down. It is harder to change a party than to write a book.

Although Deneen is critical of the Republican Party, he has nothing to say about how conservative politics—including the Christian Right—was central to the rise of neoliberalism. Nor does he reckon with the recent track record of the New Right politicians today in actually opposing neoliberalism, which is different than saying they will.

To begin with, Deneen entirely ignores just how complicit the Christian Right in the United States has been in the advancement of neoliberalism, as writers like Melinda Cooper and Bethany Moreton have shown.³ Deneen writes of the God-fearing as if they are pure victims of an elite neoliberal swindle, when their leaders designed the raw deal with gusto and their voters signed up for it by the millions. In spite of the devastation of their own communities, they chose, after all, to join the Republican wrecking crew setting out to demolish the incipi­ent welfare state. (They had their own reasons, which ranged from anti-secularism to racism.) And having finally been given the big prize of overturning Roe v. Wade, which they were so long denied, the Christian Right has less cause to abandon the neoliberal Republicans now.

And while Trump called for policies that harkened back to an iso­lationist and workerist right—and prompted intellectuals like Deneen to announce the end of the “dead consensus” of fusionism⁴—his administration’s actual policies remained largely neoliberal. Trump bragged of delivering the “biggest tax cut in U.S. history” in his first year in office, even as he served social conservatives more than prior Republicans by successfully engineering the end of Roe v. Wade. To the Far Right, however, Trump gave much less, bracketing his hatemongering speeches and promises of even more racialized border control than before.

Nor are Trump’s current rivals like Ron DeSantis—if one can call them that—offering more. “I don’t want to exaggerate the shift,” ob­served David Leonhardt recently of the pivot beyond fusionism among Trump and other presidential hopefuls today. “Republicans like De­Santis, Rubio and Trump continue to support tax cuts for the wealthy and most deregulation. The Supreme Court is dominated by Reagan-style, laissez-faire justices. The Republican Party is still mostly the party of big business.”⁵ The past near-decade since Trump’s election is a harsh verdict on hopes for transformation.

But the most graphic proof of the implausibility of turning a neo­liberal Republican party to “postliberal” ends economically has been the publication of journalist Sohrab Ahmari’s own denunciation of neo­liberalism—and his declaration upon launching it: “I Was Wrong: The GOP Will Never Be the Party of the Working Class,” Ahmari titled the piece.⁶ The third member of the current reactionary troika on the American intellectual scene with Deneen and Vermeule, Ahmari appears to be going his own way. While his book, Tyranny, Inc., is dedicated to Deneen, nothing of the Christian moralism of the prior phase of Ah­mari’s career survives in it. Almost nothing of his friend’s postliberal hankering for the alleged beneficence of premodernity, aside from a few Latin phrases tossed in, is in evidence.

Whether charmingly or frustratingly or suspiciously, Ahmari is clearly on a journey, and his views seem to change radically in every book. His newest one is easiest to read, however, as erecting a monument to the “new liberalism” of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, which indicted classical liberalism for betraying its own com­mitment to freedom by embracing the oppression of corporate and market power. The presiding authority of Ahmari’s enterprise is not Robert Bellarmine but Robert Hale, the most insightful American critic of laissez-faire. It reads like muckraking progressive-era journalism about big wigs and fat cats who exert so much economic control over the lives of ordinary people.

Though the progressive movement of our day is itself differentiated and its future is unpredictable, one thing is already sure: as Ahmari seems to see, if intellectuals of the Right continue in the star-crossed attempt to transform the Republican Party from within, the hopelessness of their cause will become more and more self-evident. This is not because the New Right lacks models for a conservative and religious welfare state, whether in the Christian Democracy of postwar Western Europe or Far Right attempts to enact Christian social thought during the interwar years. But those ideas are anything but easy to adapt to current political economy, and were generally failed and unstable experiments in their own time (not to mention that West Germany’s Christian Democratic version of it after World War II saw the incubation of neoliberalism). More important, the regnant forces of the Republican Party, including its donors, simply will not allow it to become a working-class party—except one that continues the time-honored tradition of offering up scapegoats for the economic effects of neoliberalism.

A passage in Regime Change promises an antiracist Right. But its author gives no reason to accept the credibility of reorienting the Right party as a path toward a post-neoliberal future. In spite of the damning evidence of Republican intransigence since 2016, Deneen’s devotion to social conservatism forbids him from evolving—even a little—in re­sponse to the most basic facts about the viability of a reforming Re­publican politics as a response to neoliberal depredations.

Of course, the Democrats are no more than a work in progress—even after Joe Biden’s big spending on infrastructure and relief. Deneen’s attitude toward liberals, however, is one of disgust at their identity politics, and he completely ignores the impact of the Left in mainstreaming the challenge to neoliberalism in American politics (indeed, even the word itself). For Deneen, the realignment has to be right-wing; the path beyond liberalism and neoliberalism is identical. Deneen’s own con­demnation of ongoing neoliberal elitism is thus hostage to his devotion to the Right, which has proved its more powerful stronghold.

A Better Elitism?

Even less convincingly, Deneen’s response to neoliberal elitism is a better kind of elitism. In Plato’s Republic, elite rule was the first pro­gram in political thought; and under the influence of Europeans such as Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto, an early lesson of modern political science was that elite rule endures—even among social­ists. Just as ex-leftist James Burnham Americanized and updated this thinking in the 1940s, Deneen follows suit for our time. The founding editor of this journal, indeed, already reclaimed Burnham’s theory of the “managerial elite” in order to puncture the illusion of partisan opposition in American politics—behind which lay the reality that neoliberal elitism advances regardless of which party wins elections.⁷

Deneen associates his supposedly improved elitism with so-called mixed government. Yet Deneen is drawn by his inveterate premodernism to ignore that mixed government is alive and well, and that modern times offered a new alternative to it, rather than just the prospect of returning to a bad option that clearly did not work out the first time around.

By mixed government, Deneen is referring to a ruling principle that blends regime types. It was first propounded in Plato’s Laws and, most influentially, by the Greek historian Polybius who lived a few centuries later. The idea was that combining monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy would allow polities to avoid the degradation that was (according to this view) inevitable for any single regime type. Monarchy would descend into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into mob rule—and such regimes would also inevitably cycle. The best manner of achieving a beneficent and enduring regime, Polybius and his successors surmised, lay in combining elements to make possible a stability that purity undermined.

Deneen portrays this long tradition with admiration. But there is a lot of water under the bridge since the mixed constitution was credible. For one thing, it was always indentured to premises about the inevitability of class distinctions—and corresponding worries about when the poor would revolt against the rich. Even worse, theories of the mixed constitution always assumed the special turpitude of democracy as the most chaotic and least intelligent regime. At most, from Polybius to the present, such theories made a small place for democracy among their elements, and assumed the masses were beyond education or enlightenment, incapable of self-rule.

Deneen argues that the mixed constitution offered a durable con­servatism that has somehow been lost since the British Tories under Benjamin Disraeli’s watch. But he never reflects on how neoliberalism itself has advanced in part through the devices of the mixed constitution, to limit the effects of the democratic revolution of modern times. Shock­ingly, Deneen barely discusses how profoundly the founding institutions of the United States, such as the Senate and Supreme Court, have functioned to incarnate a mixed constitution themselves. In fact, those institutions, established to counteract popular empowerment, have been central to how our current gilded age came about, and hardly suggest that some prior alternative would make our economic order less unfair. Similarly, later innovations like central banks, in this country and across the world, are also elitist by design, bypassing democracy to avoid interference with economic policymaking that affects millions. If the mixed constitution has been a big contributor to neoliberalism, appeal­ing to it as a remedy is like adding poison to poison.

Deneen’s proposed “aristopopulism,” which he says would control the excesses of the angry masses through the wise leadership of public-spirited elites rather than self-serving oligarchs, is even less defensible. For Deneen, the only hope lies in what an earlier reactionary intellectual, the German Hans Freyer, called “revolution from the right.” “To constitute a political and social order worth conserving,” Deneen explains, “something revolutionary must first take place.” If that “some­thing” went well, Deneen assures the reader, a new aristocratic class that actually cares about the common good could ascend to power; thanks to a popular revolt, a new elite would in turn spend its time on the “elevation” of the people.

But Deneen’s evocation of how this would work is hazy in the extreme—and more than a little scary. Even so, the problem is not that Deneen is rationalizing horror but that he is a feckless advocate for the very “people” he hopes to defend. The worst casualty of Deneen’s politics of revolutionary nostalgia is the very idea of modern democracy itself, which Deneen abandons and adulterates because he cannot imagine it as a freestanding regime institutionalized without competing elements.

Giving Democracy a Chance

Of course, the Left—despite its better track record of pushing for more democracy—needs its own reckoning with elite self-dealing, if only to usher in more and more democratic forms of rule at every level.⁸ Some progressives conceal their own continuing devotion to a mixed constitution in which assorted elites will rule in the name of the people, without having ever been put in power by them. Other progressives, meanwhile, insist they are already doing everything democracy requires, by taking the popular will seriously. If the first stance is noxious, the second is not persuasive—not by a long shot.

If there is anything of value in Deneen’s new book, it is an unintended reminder that liberals have not overturned neoliberalism and will court the risk of revolution from the right, big or small, as long as they don’t confront their own continuing dalliance with elite rule. Almost as much as a hundred years ago, liberals are caught up in their own syn­dromes of appointing themselves aristocrats while ruling like oligarchs. The Trump era has led progressives to some adjustment in the right direction—though Biden’s economic policies are just a start. But our era has also led progressives in great numbers to anxiety and fear that democracy itself, if not stewarded by elites, is likely to go off the rails. Contrary to Deneen, our age shows not that a better group of aristocrats is needed, but that self-styled democrats have not yet acknowledged the need, after millennia, for elites to give democracy a try.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 4 (Winter 2023): 205–12.

Notes