Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society · Jeremy Beer

From the Archive: Patrick Deneen & what's next for America

·52 min·3 clips

Deneen says liberalism must sacrifice liberty to enforce equality inside family, religion, and gender.

Jeremy Beer frames the conversation around Patrick Deneen's book Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen is introduced as a political science professor at Notre Dame whose work has been widely reviewed and debated since the book's 2018 publication by Yale University Press. The first task is definitional. Beer asks Deneen to restate the claim that liberalism, in a philosophical sense, makes promises it cannot keep. Deneen answers that the problem is not just policy failure. He argues that liberalism is destructive of civil society because it steadily weakens the institutions that ordinary people care about. Family, community, and church come up again and again. Beer keeps pressing for clarity and consequence, asking what follows from the diagnosis. The discussion then widens from the book to the present political moment. Deneen says the current rebellion is transnational and not limited to the United States. He describes it as a response to managed democracy and woke capitalism. The comparison he reaches for is older than the present debate. He links the moment to nineteenth-century British thought responding to the Industrial Revolution. Christopher Lasch appears as one of the strongest analysts of that strain. Deneen treats the impulse as a demand for relative stability in daily life. It is not, in his telling, a Marxist demand for equality. It is a plea to preserve the institutions people actually rely on. Beer and Deneen keep returning to the family, the community, and the church as those institutions. The conversation also refuses to reduce everything to Donald Trump. Deneen argues that Trump has distracted people from deeper underlying currents. He casts the coming struggle as a larger contest between an older, Disraelian conservatism and the managerial, woke-capitalist order. One side has most of the money and most of the institutions. The other side has the votes. That imbalance gives the exchange its urgency. Deneen says the debate will not end with any one election. He expects it to shape the next decade or so. The final stretch turns practical. Beer asks how resistance might work and what people can do to preserve the forms of life they value. Deneen suggests that if those patterns are named and defended consciously, younger people may come to see them as good ways of living rather than mere inheritance.

As heard by us

A calm discussion of liberalism, civil society, and the institutions ordinary people want preserved.

Patrick Deneen's critique of liberalism anchors a calm discussion of civil society and the institutions many people still want to keep intact.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a serious map of the fight over liberalism, press play.

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