How extremist right wing elites see liberals and liberalism

The topic of what America's extremist, radical right and its Republican Party see and think is of high personal interest. It's also of high importance for American democracy and civil liberties. The NYT published a review by Jennifer Szalai of a new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Regime Change was written extremist right elite academic Patrick J. Deneen (political science, U. Notre Dame) who also published the book, Why Liberalism Failed, in 2018. 

This guy speaks for America's extremist radical right elites. He is one of them. Szalai writes:

In 2018, he published “Why Liberalism Failed,” a scathing and sweeping critique that was attentively discussed by the very people (establishment politicians, Ivy League academics, mainstream journalists) he depicted as too ruthless and arrogant to care about the problems ravaging the country: ecological degradation, economic devastation, social isolation, deaths of despair. .... Multiple articles in this newspaper parsed his argument, precisely because it voiced some of the discontent that had helped propel Donald J. Trump into the highest office.

Yet if Deneen’s new book, “Regime Change,” is any indication, he and his fellow social conservatives are feeling as persecuted as ever. Never mind that the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade last year, and statewide bans on abortions are proceeding apace. Or that red-state lawmakers are removing books on the barest pretext that they might offend conservative sensibilities. In “Regime Change,” Deneen .... depicts the current dispensation as not just inadequate but unbearable — so much so that he deigns to go beyond theorizing to propose what he would like to do about it.

In the introduction, he gives a hint at what’s to come: “What is needed — and what most ordinary people instinctively seek — is stability, order, continuity and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word for it, is a conservatism that conserves.”

The confidence (and condescension) is breathtaking, but it turns out that Deneen doesn’t believe that “ordinary people” are up to the task of effecting the necessary change. They have been too degraded by an “invasive progressive tyranny” to yield anything other than a populist movement that is “untutored and ill led,” he writes, alluding to Trump. After spending 150 pages disparaging the “elite,” Deneen goes on, in the last third of the book, to try to reclaim the word for a “self-conscious aristoi” who would dispense with all the liberal niceties about equality and freedom and instead serve as the vanguard of a muscular “aristopopulism.”

The desired result, he says, would be a “mixed regime” or “mixed constitution.” Scholars have already discerned some traces of a mixed constitution in the American system’s separation of powers, but Deneen envisions something more radical (and less liberal) than “checks and balances.” He wants a “blending,” or “melding,” of the conservative elite with the (non-liberal) populace, their interests and sensibilities fusing into “one thing.” As much as he tries to dance around how such a profound transformation might come about .... he eventually admits what he believes it would take: “The raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism.”

He gets misty-eyed reminiscing about the “quiet leadership” provided by “small-town doctors” and a Hollywood that produced movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It all sounds gentle and quaint except when Deneen erupts in demands for an “overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class.”

Deneen offers a vague reassurance that the “raw assertion of political power” would somehow be wielded in a “peaceful but vigorous” way, proposing that the number of representatives in the House be expanded to a truly wild 6,000 and pointing to autocratic Hungary’s efforts “to increase family formation and birth rates” as exemplary. He also offers a vague reassurance that the postliberal future will not revive the prejudice and bigotry of the past. .... one way to make reading this book less of a slog would be to create a drinking game out of these labored attempts to cover his flank [ass].

But Deenen’s fellow social conservatives can take heart that at least some prejudices — or “customs” — would remain, as Deneen decries what he calls an “effort to displace ‘traditional’ forms of marriage, family and sexual identity based in nature.” .... Deneen’s worldview is unrelentingly zero-sum. He says he seeks nothing less than the “renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”

And what if you don’t want to live in this regime — one that rejects “democratic pluralism” and sounds suspiciously like a theocracy? Well, that’s too bad for you. “The common good is always either served or undermined by a political order,” Deneen declares toward the end of his book. “There is no neutrality on the matter.” He wants to recreate “the authoritative claims of the village,” but on a national or even international scale — sidestepping the uncomfortable fact that such grand projects have had, to put it mildly, a troubling historical record. He calls on postliberals to aim big, “embracing, fostering and protecting not only the nation but that which is both smaller and larger than the nation.”

Underneath all the gemütlich [cozy, comforting] 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.

Once again, we clearly see an aggressive, authoritarian Christian theocratic ideology that underpins America's radical right vision of the common good. The common good is to be imposed by force of law, or just plain brute force. It is to be run for our own good by an elite aristocratic Christian Taliban. After all, us bamboozled common people don't know what we want or what the common good really is. 

The extremist radical right sits somewhere

in the lower right quadrant,

maybe close to national socialism?