From a Notre Dame professor comes a provocative call for replacing the tyranny of the self-serving liberal elite with conservative leaders aligned with the interests of the working class.
For a book that’s ostensibly about the oppressively liberal American political system, a surprising number of pages are devoted to the ins and outs of what happens on elite college campuses ... The confidence (and condescension) is breathtaking ... Deneen’s worldview is unrelentingly zero-sum ... Underneath all the gemütlich verbs lurks a suggestion that some readers may find chilling: a vision of the "common good" so obvious to Deneen that it’s not up for debate or discussion.
Despite his weakness for abstraction and overstatement, [Deneen] is a serious historian of ideas ... So what if anything comes after liberalism? This is where Deneen’s argument becomes incoherent. He is strong on rhetoric, but weak on policy prescriptions and for a conservative can sound alarmingly like a revolutionary ... If for him liberalism is the god that failed, he also remains hopeful, yet ultimately cannot explain how the transformative politics he seeks will come into effect.
Deneen’s disregard for details, among them the awkward fact that no one actually defends the position he attributes to practically everyone, is unfortunately characteristic. The post-liberals are dramatic, even hysterical, stylists, prone to sweeping pronouncements about the entirety of culture since the dawn of time ... The uninitiated might wonder whether Deneen should have consulted a single ambassador of 'the many' before making so many confident assertions about 'what most ordinary people instinctively seek' ... Deneen makes it easy to turn away from his politics of personality and his terminological indignities.
