Regime Change

Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change is a sequel to his ambitious and provocative Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018. If anything, it is even more ambitious and provocative than its predecessor, calling for “regime change” where the first book simply and modestly recommended “the patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order” (WLF, xv). Since they provide a clear and in some cases compelling perspective on our current cultural and political predicament, both books deserve the attention they have gotten and are getting. Deneen’s is an important and distinctive voice in our debate, one we neglect at our peril. But to attend to Deneen’s argument is not necessarily to assent to it, as I hope this review demonstrates. We might first of all ask why Deneen’s patience has been replaced by such a sense of urgency that he is willing to call for the adoption of “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” (RC, 167), a proposal in bold-face type in the book, and to echo Vladimir Lenin in titling the third part of the book “what is to be done.” Perhaps the political setting has changed, with the first book largely written before Donald Trump took office and the second in the middle of the Biden Administration. Perhaps some political or judicial possibilities have emerged, making “aristopopulism” conceivable in a way heretofore impossible. Perhaps the development of an embryonic multiethnic working-class coalition has opened new vistas for Deneen. Perhaps the comprehensive embrace of antiracism and intersectionality on the Left made its soft totalitarianism even more evident to those with eyes to see. Perhaps COVID made it impossible to ignore the yawning chasm between the haves, who could continue to work in the relative safety of their homes, and the have-nots, who lost their jobs or risked their health to keep them. Perhaps doors opening and doors slamming shut encouraged urgency and discouraged patience. Nevertheless, it makes more sense to attend to what Deneen actually says in the book than to speculate about events and circumstances that he does not explicitly or extensively address. While both books share a critical analysis of liberalism—developed fully in the first book and sketched in the second—Regime Change focuses its attention on the class analysis first mentioned in Why Liberalism Failed. The “new aristocracy” (WLF, 131) of the latter gets a much fuller treatment in Regime Change. Building upon the work of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, Michael Lind’s The New Class War, and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, Deneen offers a well-developed account of the current iteration of the age-old conflict between “the few” and “the many,” those who in our time have successfully adapted to the placeless high-tech marketplace, embracing constant innovation, change, and creative destruction, on the one hand, and those who sought refuge—for the most part unsuccessfully—from the impersonal forces that threatened their livelihoods and their communities, the “winners” and “losers” in our new global economic order. To elucidate the theoretical dimension of this conflict, Deneen relies on some familiar sources (Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Marx, among others) and an unexpected one—John Locke, whose presence in the pantheon of theorists of class conflict is in part required to interpret liberals as self-conscious combatants in this affray. In particular, Deneen calls our attention to a passage he cited more than once in Why Liberalism Failed, where Locke refers to the distinction between “the industrious and rational,” on the one side, and “the quarrelsome and contentious,” on the other (see Locke, Second Treatise, Sec. 34 and, e.g. RC, 72 and WLF, 136). Deneen reads this Lockean distinction as referring to the difference between ambitious proto-capitalists and the people, a “potentially ‘radical’ force, particularly for the potential of envy and resentment to undermine liberal rights of property” (RC, 74). Given what Locke says later about