By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

The populistic despair in large sections of the American electorate that propelled Donald Trump to power in 2016 and continues to support him through thick and thin has now been given some ideological heft.

Several American writers have recently published books criticizing the American liberal order, root and branch. Three of them, University of Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, and journalist Sohrab Ahmari come from the Catholic right.

Religion and culture

These “post-liberal” authors have jettisoned the older conservative tradition associated with figures such as William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. For them, the true conservative tradition lies in what is sometimes called “integralism,” the weaving of religion, personal morality, national culture and public policy into a unified theory of a proper political order.

Deneen and Ahmari, especially, describe an ailing society in which inequality is rampant, the exploitation of workers is widespread and Community life is disintegrating. How, they ask, has this come about?

Deneen’s new work, “Regime change: Toward a postliberal future,” is scathing in its description of the state America currently finds itself. For him, modernity has had a baneful effect on the political culture.

Deneen and Ahmari, especially, describe an ailing society in which inequality is rampant, the exploitation of workers is widespread and community life is disintegrating. 

While earlier generations understood that true freedom resides in “self-rule, self-discipline, and self-government,” liberal modernists, in Deneen’s opinion, catastrophically reimagined it as “liberation from limitations imposed by birthright,” leading to a kind of social and cultural free-for-all.

“Modern thought,” writes Deneen, “rests on a core assumption: transformative progress is a key goal of human society.”

A new tyranny

Corrosive of every form of social life, liberal ideology, in his view, is an “anti-culture,” a “new tyranny,” a “totalitarian undertaking,” and “national suicide.” Liberals, he asserts, have purposely eroded the basic forums of social solidarity, that of “family, neighborhood, association, church and religious community.”

They now govern as a minority against the popular majority – what he terms “the many.” As a result, the problem of politics today is the gulf that separates the powerful from the masses.

Such liberals preach that the only reasonable life is one liberated from the constraints of duty and tradition, “all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the ‘culture’ comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods.”

These coastal urbanities have abandoned anyone not in what he sarcastically calls the “laptop class” and have left the country’s geographic middle hollowed out and despondent.

Remaking the country will require “aristopopulism,” a regime headed by a new elite of trained aristoi (from the Greek for “the best people”) who “understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.”

Common good

So, Deneen’s alternative to an “exhausted, licentious liberalism” is a form of politics that stresses “the priority of culture, the wisdom of the people,” and “preserving the commonplace traditions of a polity.” It is a conservatism that seeks what he and others label “the common good.”

In the realm of law and practical policy, no one has done more to define this kind of common good than Vermeule. His "Common good constitutionalism" aims to recover a mode of thinking that he believes has been forgotten. In this view, law’s purpose is to promote what a flourishing political community requires: justice, peace, prosperity, and morality. This legacy, he maintains, has been lost, and Vermeule argues for its recovery in the form of “common good constitutionalism.”

The common good is “unitary and indivisible, not an aggregation of individual utilities,” a definition that requires preferring judicial rulings that favour obligation to one’s family and community, empowering lower levels of authority such as states and towns, and upholding what Vermeule understands as natural law.

Liberals have erected a constitutional order in which legitimacy derives from rights-bearing individuals who periodically choose representatives to write statutes, judge disputes, and keep the peace.

But if those structures produce outcomes contrary to the common good, Vermeule does not hesitate to state that they will have to be dismantled. The basis for rightful authority should be the “objective legal and moral order” that common-good constitutionalists are best placed to perceive.

Rigged system

The premise of Amhari’s “Tyranny, Inc.: How private power crushed American liberty – and what to do about it,” is that “private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments” and that “unchallenged market power can impair our rights and liberties.”

The book makes the argument that the country’s leaders deregulated big business on the faith that it would yield a better economy and a freer society. But the opposite happened. Americans lost stable, well-paying jobs, Wall Street dominated industry to the detriment of the middle class and local communities, and corporations began to dictate what people are allowed to think.

Ahmari’s worker-oriented conservatism contends that even well-meaning elites are no match for a system rigged so rampantly in favour of the bosses. An employer, simply by dint of being an employer, “faces an economic compulsion that forces him to coerce the worker, regardless of his cultural outlook.”

These writers seek to provide what we might call “old-new” ways of dealing with America’s formidable political problems. Will they gain currency?