Pioneers Against Postliberalism
In recent years, American conservatives seem obsessed with lamentation. Intellectual magazines and other outposts of conservative intellectualism have promoted several narratives of national decline which lift up a mythic American past to contrast with a supposedly dreary American present. But scratching beneath the surface, there is nothing particularly innovative about concerns for American deracination such as those expressed by Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen. In fact, writers from that supposedly glorious past, such as Norwegian-American novelist O.E. Rølvaag, explored themes of American alienation decades before the current generation of conservative intellectuals was even born. Not only is their work more original and interesting, it also offers better solutions to the problems the American republic faces today.
Deneen’s central worry is that Americans have been uprooted from their lives and reduced to a state of atomized individualism. He claims that the pioneering American spirit of hope is an “implicitly theorized” desire for “the better, greater, more perfect opportunity” that points only to “a happiness ever out of reach.” In other words, Deneen believes that there is something about what others have called “the American creed” that leads American citizens to hubristically deny limits on their hopes. Unlike citizens of more ancient regimes, Deneen views Americans as fundamentally insatiable and therefore fundamentally unhappy.
In fact, Deneen says his own students are defined by lives of “gnawing and ceaseless worry.” Rather than returning home and improving the places they are from, Deneen contends these students view such a prospect with nothing less than horror — their supposedly desperate, unlimited desire is to “be extracted from the crowded favelas, never to be seen again.” In this way, all Americans “outwardly exhibit the appearance of citizenship,” actually only “have the souls of tyrants.’
The “implicit theory” which has allegedly inspired these desires stems from the influence of “teachers of evil” such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the American Founding. Their liberalism, he claims, begins with an assertion that mankind’s natural state is one “free and independent... of society, of culture, of laws and civilization.” Later, he attributes to James Madison the view that the “freedom to make yourself is the reason that government comes into existence.” Ultimately, Deneen’s relationship to the American republic is alienated in the extreme — he simply does not seem to believe he can reconcile being a subject of God’s kingdom with his American citizenship.
Read more in Mere Orthodoxy.
