Liberal Democracy Is Not the Problem: With authoritarianism on the rise at home and abroad, now is no time to give up on the American experiment.

• Author: Plattner, Marc F.
• Position: Why Liberalism Failed - Book review

Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Yale University Press, 248 pp.

There is no shortage of books by American conservatives attacking American liberals, and at first sight Why Liberalism Failed might appear to be just one more addition to the genre. But the book's title is misleading, for its author, Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at Notre Dame, offers a critique of contemporary conservatism as well. Indeed, he views contemporary progressivism and conservatism, the "main political options of our age," as two sides of "the same counterfeit coin." Both sides accept the fundamental principles of liberalism in the broader sense, the sense conveyed by the phrase "liberal democracy"--principles that include individual rights, constitutionalism, and the rule of law.

Despite its attack on the basic underpinnings of the American regime, Deneen's book has already been greeted with respectful, if critical, comments by the conservative New York Times columnists David Brooks and Ross Douthat. It is easy to see why Deneen's defense of the family, order, virtue, and tradition would appeal to many conservatives. Likewise his attack on the looseness of contemporary culture (or "anticulture," as he prefers to label it) for its emphasis on individual autonomy over community values.

Yet the views he expresses on other matters are likely to appeal to progressives. He deplores "our environmental crisis--climate change, resource depletion, groundwater contamination and scarcity, species extinction." He is also a staunch critic of free-market capitalism, "including deregulation, globalization, and the protection of titanic inequalities."

Deneen would argue, however, that there is no contradiction in his simultaneous rejection of both the individualism of the pro-market right and the statism of the big-government left. For he sees these two political orientations as giving rise to "a vicious and reinforcing cycle," in which an ever-expanding state is the inevitable response to the disruption produced by the market and the rampant individualism that it fosters.

What unites these two seemingly opposed political orientations, according to Deneen, is a common attachment to the fundamental principles of the modern liberal tradition, which he rightly traces to the writings of the philosopher John Locke. Preeminent among the fundamental political principles championed by Locke were human equality, individual rights, and government by consent of the...