## Metadata - Author: [[Patrick J. Deneen]] - Full Title: Why Liberalism Failed - Category: #books ## Highlights - Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based on falsehood about human nature, and hence can’t help but fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain until the regime loses legitimacy. ([Location 191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=191)) - the vehicles of our liberation have become iron cages of our captivity. ([Location 201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=201)) - The economic system that simultaneously is both liberalism’s handmaiden and its engine, like a Frankenstein monster, takes on a life of its own, and its processes and logic can no longer be controlled by people purportedly enjoying the greatest freedom in history. ([Location 253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=253)) - At the moment of liberalism’s culmination, then, we see the headlong evacuation of the liberal arts. The liberal arts were long understood to be the essential form of education for a free people, especially citizens who aspired to self-government. The emphasis on the great texts—which were great not only or even because they were old but because they contained hard-won lessons on how humans learn to be free, especially free from the tyranny of their insatiable desires—has been jettisoned in favor of what was once considered “servile education,” an education concerned exclusively with money making and a life of work, and hence reserved for those who did not enjoy the title of “citizen.” Today’s liberals condemn a regime that once separated freeman from serf, master from slave, citizen from servant, but even as we have ascended to the summit of moral superiority over our benighted forebears by proclaiming everyone free, we have almost exclusively adopted the educational form that was reserved for those who were deprived of freedom. And yet in the midst of our glorious freedom, we don’t think to ask why we no longer have the luxury of an education whose very name—liberal arts—indicates its fundamental support for the cultivation of the free person. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=281)) - Francis Bacon—who rejected classical arguments that learning aimed at the virtues of wisdom, prudence, and justice, arguing instead that “knowledge is power”—compared nature to a prisoner who, under torture, might be compelled to reveal her long-withheld secrets. ([Location 297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=297)) - As the farmer and author Wendell Berry has written, if modern science and technology were conceived as a “war against nature,” then “it is a war in every sense—nature is fighting us as much as we are fighting it. And . . . it appears that we are losing.”4 Many elements of what we today call our environmental crisis—climate change, resource depletion, groundwater contamination and scarcity, species extinction—are signs of battles won but a war being lost. Today we are accustomed to arguing that we should follow the science in an issue such as climate change, ignoring that our crisis is the result of long-standing triumphs of science and technology in which “following science” was tantamount to civilizational progress. Our carbon-saturated world is the hangover of a 150-year party in which, until the very end, we believed we had achieved the dream of liberation from nature’s constraints. ([Location 301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=301)) - Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=320)) - The autonomous self is thus subject to the sovereign trajectory of the very forces today that are embraced as the tools of our liberation. Yet our liberation renders us incapable of resisting these defining forces—the promise of freedom results in thralldom to inevitabilities to which we have no choice but to submit. These tools were deployed to liberate individuals from the “givenness” of their condition, especially through “depersonalization” and “abstraction,” liberalism’s vision of liberty from particular duties, obligations, debts, and relationships. These ends have been achieved through the depersonalization and abstraction advanced via two main entities—the state and the market. Yet while they have worked together in a pincer movement to render us ever more naked as individuals, our political debates mask this alliance by claiming that allegiance to one of these forces will save us from the depredations of the other. Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security—the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market. ([Location 326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=326)) - Having successfully disembedded us from relationships that once made claims upon us but also informed our conception of selfhood, our sense of ourselves as citizens sharing a common fate and as economic actors sharing a common world, liberalism has left the individual exposed to the tools of liberation—leaving us in a weakened state in which the domains of life that were supposed to liberate us are completely beyond our control or governance. This suggests that all along, the individual was the “tool” of the liberal system, not—as was believed—vice versa. ([Location 343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=343)) - Both main political options of our age must be understood as different sides of the same counterfeit coin. ([Location 349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=349)) - Liberalism has ruthlessly drawn down a reservoir of both material and moral resources that it cannot replenish. Its successes were always blank checks written against a future it trusted it could repair. ([Location 353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=353)) - A rejection of the world’s first and last remaining ideology does not entail its replacement with a new and doubtless not very different ideology. Political revolution to overturn a revolutionary order would produce only disorder and misery. A better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance: practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the anticulture of liberalism. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=365)) - First, politics would be based upon reliability of “the low” rather than aspiration to “the high.” The classical and Christian effort to foster virtue was rejected as both paternalistic and ineffectual, prone to abuse and unreliability. It was Machiavelli who broke with the classical and Christian aspiration to temper the tyrannical temptation through an education in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic tradition as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fantasies of “imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.”3 Rather than promoting unrealistic standards for behavior—especially self-limitation—that could at best be unreliably achieved, Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed, and the quest for glory. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=416)) - A succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity. ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=446)) - Liberalism has been a wager that it can produce more benefits than the costs it would amass, all the while rendering liberal humanity widely insensate to the fact that the mounting costs are the result of those touted benefits. Thus most today view this wager as a settled bet, a question whose outcome is no longer in question. Yet the gathering evidence, once seen clearly as not circumstantially generated but arising directly from liberalism’s fruition, reveals that the bookie’s collector is knocking upon the door. ([Location 492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=492)) - Liberalism is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=498)) - The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals. This argument was first articulated in the protoliberal defense of monarchy by Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, human beings exist by nature in a state of radical independence and autonomy. Recognizing the fragility of a condition in which life in such a state is “nasty, brutish, and short,” they employ their rational self-interest to sacrifice most of their natural rights in order to secure the protection and security of a sovereign. Legitimacy is conferred by consent. ([Location 502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=502)) - Liberalism begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes increasingly dependent on whether those relationships have been chosen, and chosen on the basis of their service to rational self-interest. ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=516)) - Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It displaced first the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and later the notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences and humanity’s relationship to the natural world. The first wave of this revolution—inaugurated by early-modern thinkers dating back to the Renaissance—insisted that man should employ natural science and a transformed economic system to seek mastery of nature. The second wave—developed largely by various historicist schools of thought, especially in the nineteenth century—replaced belief in the idea of a fixed human nature with belief in human “plasticity” and capacity for moral progress. These two iterations of liberalism—often labeled “conservative” and “progressive”—contend today for ascendance, but we do better to understand their deep interconnection. ([Location 553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=553)) - First-wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives,” who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological “enhancement.” Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies. Today’s political debates occur largely and almost exclusively between these two varieties of liberals. Neither side confronts the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature defended by the preliberal tradition. ([Location 571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=571)) - Liberalism is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world. Its two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity. ([Location 576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=576)) - Liberalism thus culminates in two ontological points: the liberated individual and the controlling state. Hobbes’s Leviathan perfectly portrayed those realities: the state consists solely of autonomous individuals, and these individuals are “contained” by the state. The individual and the state mark two points of ontological priority. ([Location 596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=596)) - No matter the political program of today’s leaders, more is the incontestable program. Liberalism can function only by the constant increase of available and consumable material goods, and thus with the constant expansion of nature’s conquest and mastery. No person can aspire to a position of political leadership by calling for limits and self-command. ([Location 624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=624)) - Liberalism was thus a titanic wager that ancient norms of behavior could be lifted in the name of a new form of liberation and that conquering nature would supply the fuel to permit nearly infinite choices. The twin outcomes of this effort—the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources—make inevitable an inquiry into what comes after liberalism. ([Location 626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=626)) - Taken to its logical conclusion, liberalism’s end game is unsustainable in every respect: it cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back inexorably into a future in which extreme license coexists with extreme oppression. ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=632)) - The ancient claim that man is a political animal, and must through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost. Currently we attempt to treat the numerous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberalism’s liberty, but not the deeper sources of those symptoms, the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commitments. While most commentators regard our current crises—whether understood morally or economically—as a technical problem to be solved by better policy, our most thoughtful citizens must consider whether these crises are the foreshocks of a more systemic quake ahead. Unlike the ancient Romans who, confident in their eternal city, could not imagine a condition after Rome, the rising barbarism within the city forces us now to consider the prospect that a better way awaits. ([Location 636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=636)) - Thus classical liberals claim that the individual is fundamental and, through an act of contract and consent, brings into existence a limited government. Progressive liberals claim that the individual is never wholly self-sufficient, and that we must instead understand ourselves to be more deeply defined by membership in a larger unit of humanity. Because the two sides appear to be defined not only by a gaping policy divide but by different anthropological assumptions, their deeper shared undercurrent can be difficult to discern. Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our membership in the state. In distinct but related ways, the right and left cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism, although from different perspectives, using different means, and claiming different agendas. This deeper cooperation helps to explain how it has happened that contemporary liberal states—whether in Europe or America—have become simultaneously both more statist, with ever more powers and activity vested in central authority, and more individualistic, with people becoming less associated and involved with such mediating institutions as voluntary associations, political parties, churches, communities, and even family. ([Location 676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=676)) - Far from there being an inherent conflict between the individual and the state—as so much of modern political reporting would suggest—liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection: its ideal of liberty can be realized only through a powerful state. If the expansion of freedom is secured by law, then the opposite also holds true in practice: increasing freedom requires the expansion of law. ([Location 720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=720)) - At the heart of liberal theory is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit of human existence, the only natural human entity that exists. Liberal practice then seeks to expand the conditions for this individual’s realization. The individual is to be liberated from all the partial and limiting affiliations that preceded the liberal state, if not by force then by constantly lowering the barriers to exit. The state claims to govern all groupings within the society: it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate groupings, and from its point of view, streamlining the relationship between the individual and the liberal state. ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=739)) - The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order. The imposition of the liberal order is accompanied by the legitimizing myth that its form was freely chosen by unencumbered individuals; that it was the consequence of extensive state intervention is ignored by all but a few scholars. Few works have made this intervention clearer than the historian and sociologist Karl Polanyi’s classic study The Great Transformation. ([Location 744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=744)) - Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom. Behind the lines, however, both have consistently sought the expansion of the sphere of liberation in which the individual can best pursue his or her preferred lifestyle, leading to mutual support of the expansion of the state as the requisite setting in which the autonomous individual could come into being. While “conservative” liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that might limit the market’s role in the life of a community.16 And while “progressive” liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to enforcement of “manners and morals,” preferring the open marketplace of individual “buyers and sellers,” especially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently expands to enlarge our self-definition as “consumers”—a word more often used today to describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than “citizens”—while entertaining us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect aren’t that different after all. ([Location 835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=835)) - As the empire of liberty grows, the reality of liberty recedes. ([Location 943](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=943)) - Today, with the success of the liberal project in the economic sphere, the powers of the liberal state are increasingly focused on dislocating those remaining cultural institutions that were responsible for governance of consumer and sexual appetite—purportedly in the name of freedom and equality, but above all in a comprehensive effort to displace cultural forms as the ground condition of liberal liberty. Only constraints approved by the liberal state itself can finally be acceptable. The assumption is that legitimate limits upon liberty can arise only from the authority of the consent-based liberal state. ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=975)) - Culture is the “convention” by which humans interact responsibly with nature, at once conforming to its governance while introducing human ingenuity and invention within its limits and boundaries. ([Location 981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=981)) - A culture develops above all in awareness of nature’s limits, offerings, and demands. This awareness is not “theorized” but is a lived reality that often cannot be described until it has ceased to exist.3 Liberalism, by contrast, has aimed consistently at disassociating cultural forms from nature. The effect is at once to liberate humans from acknowledgement of nature’s limits while rendering culture into wholly relativist belief and practice, untethered from anything universal or enduring. The aim of mastering nature toward the end of liberating humanity from its limits—a project inaugurated in the thought of Francis Bacon—was simultaneously an assault on cultural norms and practices developed alongside nature. The imperative to overcome culture as part of the project of mastering nature was expressed with forthright clarity by John Dewey, one of liberalism’s great heroes. Dewey insisted that the progress of liberation rested especially upon the active control of nature, and hence required the displacement of traditional beliefs and culture that reflected a backward and limiting regard for the past. He described these two approaches to the human relationship to nature as “civilized” versus “savage.” The savage tribe manages to live in the desert, he wrote, by adapting itself to the natural limits of its environment; thus “its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use.” A “civilized people” in the same desert also adapts; but “it introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment.”4 Dewey traced his thought back to Francis Bacon, whom he considered the most important thinker in history. Bacon, he wrote in his Reconstruction in Philosophy, teaches that “scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.” The scientist “must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.” ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=992)) - liberals). A core feature of the liberal project is antipathy to culture as a deep relationship with a nature that defines and limits human nature. ([Location 1014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1014)) - More than a system of government or legal and political order, liberalism is about redefining the human perception of time. ([Location 1016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1016)) - This transformation of the experience of time has been described in terms of two distinct forms of time: whereas preliberal humanity experienced time as cyclical, modernity thinks of it as linear. While suggestive and enlightening, this linear conception of time is still premised on a fundamental continuity between past, present, and future. Liberalism in its several guises in fact advances a conception of fractured time, of time fundamentally disconnected, and shapes humans to experience different times as if they were radically different countries. ([Location 1036](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1036)) - At the heart of the liberal arts in this older tradition was an education in what it meant to be human, above all how to achieve freedom, not only from external restraint but from the tyranny of internal appetite and desire. The “older science” sought to encourage the hard and difficult task of negotiating what was permitted and what was forbidden, what constituted the highest and best use of our freedom, and what actions were wrong. Each new generation was encouraged to consult the great works of our tradition, the epics, the great tragedies and comedies, the reflections of philosophers and theologians, the revealed word of God, the countless books that sought to teach us how to use our liberty well. To be free—liberal—was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education. And the soul of the liberal arts was the humanities, education in how to be a human being. ([Location 1553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1553)) - The American university slowly changed from the teaching of this older science to a teaching of the new. In the nineteenth century, a growing number of universities were established or began to emulate the example of the German universities, dividing themselves into specialized disciplines and placing a new stress upon the education of graduate students—a training in expert knowledge—and placed a new priority upon discovery of new knowledge. Slowly the religious underpinnings of the university were discarded and discontinued; while the humanities continued to remain at the heart of the liberal arts education, they were no longer guided by a comprehensive vision afforded by the religious traditions whose vision and creed had provided the organizing principle for the efforts of the university. ([Location 1566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1566)) - Inspired by Heideggerian theories that placed primacy on the liberation of the will, first poststructuralism and then postmodernism took root. These and other approaches, while apparently hostile to the rationalist claims of the sciences, were embraced out of the need to conform to the academic demands, set by the natural sciences, for “progressive” knowledge. Faculty could demonstrate their progressiveness by showing the backwardness of the texts; they could “create knowledge” by showing their superiority to the authors they studied; they could display their antitraditionalism by attacking the very books that were the basis of their discipline. Philosophies that preached “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” that aimed to expose the way texts were deeply informed by inegalitarian prejudices, and that even questioned the idea that texts contained a “teaching” as intended by the author, offered the humanities the possibility of proving themselves relevant in the terms set by the modern scientific approach.4 By adopting a jargon comprehensible only to “experts,” they could emulate the scientific priesthood, even if by doing so they betrayed the humanities’ original mandate to guide students through their cultural inheritance. Professors in the humanities showed their worth by destroying the thing they studied. ([Location 1621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1621)) - The economic crisis, as everyone now knows, was the result of the idea that one could consume without limits, that a new kind of economics, combined with a liberatory politics, now allowed us to live beyond our means. The wanting of something was warrant for the taking of the thing. Our appetite justified consumption. Our want was sufficient for our satiation. The result was not merely literal obesity but moral obesity—a lack of self-governance of our appetites ultimately forced us on a starvation diet. ([Location 1698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1698)) - As the essayist and farmer Wendell Berry has written, awareness of fundamental constraints of human action and behavior is not the condemnation that it may seem. On the contrary, it returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage, from which our self-definition as limitless animals has for too long cut us off. Every cultural and religious tradition that I know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, defines us specifically as humans—that is, as animals (if that word still applies) capable of living within natural limits but also within cultural limits, self-imposed. As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as “earth” or “ecosystem” or “watershed” or “place.” But as humans we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied by neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, loyalty, and love. ([Location 1731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1731)) - As commended by ancient and religious traditions alike, liberty is not liberation from constraint but rather our capacity to govern appetite and thus achieve a truer form of liberty—liberty from enslavement to our appetites and avoidance of depletion of the world. ([Location 1753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1753)) - A two-tier system has arisen in which elite students are culled from every corner of the globe so that they may prepare for lives of deracinated vagabondage, majoring only in what Wendell Berry calls “upward mobility.” Elite universities engage in the educational equivalent of strip mining: identifying economically viable raw materials in every city, town, and hamlet, they strip off that valuable commodity, process it in a distant location, and render the products economically useful for productivity elsewhere. The places that supplied the raw materials are left much like depressed coal towns whose mineral wealth has been long since mined and exported. Such students embrace “identity” politics and “diversity” to serve their economic interests, perpetual “potentiality” and permanent placelessness. The identities and diversity thus secured are globally homogenous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms of globalized indifference toward shared fates of actual neighbors and communities. ([Location 1762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1762)) - Today’s students, in bondage to what the ancients would have called “servile education,” generally avoid a liberal education, having been discouraged from it by their parents and by society at large. Liberalism spells the demise of an education once thought fitting for free people. ([Location 1785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1785)) - This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility. ([Location 1846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1846)) - Centuries after Locke, John F. Kennedy summarized this wager with the promise that “a rising tide raises all boats”—echoed often by Ronald Reagan—suggesting that even the flimsiest and cheapest boat could benefit from tsunami-sized differences for those at the top and the bottom. ([Location 1849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1849)) - A society can be shaped for the benefit of most people by emphasizing mainly informal norms and customs that secure the path to flourishing for most human beings; or it can be shaped for the benefit of the extraordinary and powerful by liberating all from the constraint of custom. Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary; today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong. ([Location 1979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=1979)) - liberalism advances most effectively through both classical and progressive liberalisms, the economic liberalism of Locke and the lifestyle liberalism of Mill, even while the two claim to be locked in battle. The destruction of social norms, culture, and the social ecology of supporting institutions and associations is advanced by both the market and the state. ([Location 2018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=2018)) - The liberalocracy’s self-deception is, in the main, neither malicious nor devious. Liberalism is arguably the first regime to put into effect a version of the “Noble Lie” proposed by Plato in the Republic, which claimed not only that the ruled would be told a tale about the nature of the regime, but more important, that the ruling class would believe it as well. The “noble lie” proposes a story by which the denizens of the “ideal regime” proposed by Socrates at once believe in their fundamental equality as members of a common family and in the natural basis of their inequality. While Plato proposed the “ideal regime” as a philosophic exercise, liberalism adopted a version of “the noble lie” in order to advance a similarly constituted order, in which people would be led to believe in the legitimacy of inequality backstopped by a myth of fundamental equality. Not only would day laborers be encouraged to believe that their lot in life would continuously improve by their ascent in the advance of the liberal order, but more important, the liberalocrats would be educated in a deep self-deception that they were not a new aristocracy but the very opposite of an aristocratic order. A primary vehicle has been a veneer of social justice and concern for the disadvantaged that is keenly encouraged among liberalocrats from a young age, often at the very educational institutions most responsible for their elevation into the elite. It is often these very same people who, upon encountering the discussion of the “Noble Lie” in the Republic, will pronounce their disgust at such subterfuge, all the while wholly unaware that the Cave they occupy has been rendered invisible by the artificial lighting designed to hide its walls. ([Location 2024](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=2024)) - The genius of liberalism was to claim legitimacy on the basis of consent and arrange periodic managed elections, while instituting structures that would dissipate democratic energies, encourage the creation of a fractured and fragmented public, and ensure government by select elite actors. If this were all that liberalism achieved, however, its patina of legitimation would quickly wear thin as a frustrated populace witnessed a growing divide between the claims of democracy and the absence of popular control. Instead, the true genius of liberalism was subtly but persistently to shape and educate the citizenry to equate “democracy” with the ideal of self-made and self-making individuals—expressive individualism—while accepting the patina of political democracy shrouding a powerful and distant government whose deeper legitimacy arises from enlarging the opportunities and experience of expressive individualism. ([Location 2047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=2047)) - We effectively possess little self-government, either as citizens over our leaders or as individuals over our appetites. Citizens under liberalism are assured of our civic potency while experiencing political weakness and engaging in infinite acts of choice that are only deeper expressions of thralldom. We have endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options over whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening boredom within them. ([Location 2435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=2435)) - Part of moving toward a postliberal age is recognizing that while liberalism’s initial appeal was premised upon laudatory aspirations, its successes have often been based on a disfigurement of those aspirations. Its defenders often point to the liberation of women from conditions of inequality as a significant example of liberalism’s success, and regard any critique of liberalism as a proposal to thrust women back into preliberal bondage. Yet the main practical achievement of this liberation of women has been to move many of them into the workforce of market capitalism, a condition that traditionalists like Wendell Berry as well as Marxist political theorists like Nancy Fraser regard as a highly dubious form of liberation.1 All but forgotten are arguments, such as those made in the early Republic, that liberty consists of independence from the arbitrariness not only of a king but of an employer. Today we consider the paramount sign of the liberation of women to be their growing emancipation from their biology, which frees them to serve a different, disembodied body—“corporate” America—and participate in an economic order that effectively obviates any actual political liberty. Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount to liberation, but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage. ([Location 2440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078871BC2&location=2440))