The end of the elites

Liberalism has generated its own undoing. As a philosophy and practical political project, one of its main aims was to overthrow the old aristocracy, in which one’s social station and political position was secured by birthright. No matter how much one strived — or how dissolute one became — one’s social and political rank could not be changed. This immutability was true not only in regard to one’s political position, but as a consequence that much of one’s identity was the consequence of birth.

The ruling class of this tradition, designated by inheritance, eventually lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the people it governed. Today’s liberal ruling class, which arose to replace the old aristocracy, faces a similar challenge from below. Liberalism proposed to overthrow this ancien régime and put in its place an order in which people, through their striving, ability and hard work, could create an identity and future from the sum of their own choices.

Several hundred years into this experiment, we have witnessed at firsthand the rise of a new ruling class, a “meritocracy” that has thrived under the conditions established and advanced by liberalism. Liberalism is today in crisis, not just because of the bad behavior of the new elite, but because its rise has corresponded with the attrition of institutions that benefited the lower classes while restraining the ambitious who wished to escape its restraints. The weakening of the family, neighborhood, association, church and religious community, and other associations has resulted in the degradation of the social and economic conditions of “the many,” even as “the few” have garnered a monopoly both on economic and social advantages.

In the advanced liberal democracies across the world, working-class voters have risen up to reject the leaders who have regarded those who have been “left behind” with disdain and contempt. In response, liberalism has unmasked itself, revealing itself as an ideology that is willing to force those who oppose it into submission, and advancing an increasingly “illiberal” liberalism. Efforts to limit the political power of the culturally dispossessed and economically disadvantaged — frequently by accusing majorities of being “anti-democratic” — increasingly reveal liberalism not to be a mutually shared comprehensive system that allows self-determination, but rather a particular partisan set of commitments. Once an unassailable public philosophy, liberalism has been delegitimized.

Populism and the working class

The surge of a largely unorganized “populism” has arisen because of the degraded conditions that liberalism has created among the masses. Both social and economic conditions are measurably worse among the working classes across the western world, even as life has gotten better for the liberal ruling class. What is often called “progress” — globalized economic expansion and the dismantling of traditional social mores — has largely benefited only a small liberal elite. Like the revolutions against the ancien regime, the current order has lost support of the demos.

These degraded conditions have arisen not because liberalism has failed, but because it has succeeded. Titanic economic inequality and a fraying social fabric are the results of realizing liberalism’s conception of liberty. Ancient ideals of liberty as self-rule, requiring duty and self-sacrifice, were replaced with the liberal understanding of freedom: doing as one likes. Realization of liberal freedom has led to a hyper-individualistic order that weakens national economic solidarity and tends toward the dismantling of social institutions.

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The institutions of family, religion and government raised guardrails on the otherwise natural appetites and desires that, when succumbed to, resulted in what the classical and Biblical tradition regarded as a condition of servitude or slavery. The person who succumbed to lower nature not only had the soul of a  slave, but also had the soul of a tyrant — a gluttony for power that would allow the enslaved tyrant to commit any act, any crime, any awful deed. All of the citizenry, including the powerful, needed to be habituated to the virtue that accorded with this classical ideal of freedom, and the guardrails helped with that education for liberty.

Under the new definition of liberty, what had previously been considered as guardrails came instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations on individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberal liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefinition or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts and even the churches. In their place, a flattened world invites: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a vast and widening playground for the project of self-creation.

The progressive narrative of history

Today, the story of liberalism’s tearing down of guardrails is often told as a progress from heroic overcoming of past injustices to a present moment of enlightenment, justice, liberty and equality. Oppressed people are liberated from the unjust constraints of an earlier age. Anyone questioning the story is accused of defending privilege and nostalgically craving to reinstitute the injustices of a benighted past.

This “Whig history,” a tale invented by the progressive liberals whose ideas won out, gets history wrong. The progressive narrative is self-serving, ignoring lessons from the past about “limiting” institutions that actually serve freedom.

A characteristic self-congratulatory story of liberal progress is told by one of liberalism’s heroes, John Stuart Mill. In his classic text “On Liberty,” Mill denounced the constraining role of tradition in favor of an open, liberal society that advantages those who seek to disrupt these kinds of formative institutions. In Mill’s parlance, custom is a “despot” over the lives of those who wish to instead engage in “experiments in living.” While it’s doubtless the case that custom appears to be a “despot” to those who seek to disrupt and overthrow long-standing traditions and customs of society, from another perspective, custom and the associated array of institutions that support and perpetuate ongoing cultural practices exist not merely to prevent the liberty of self-inventions, but to protect ordinary people from the potential rapaciousness of the ambitious.

Viewed in such a light, these informal but pervasive cultural forms not only prevent efforts of a revolutionary character from reordering society around the imperative of individual liberty, but they protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people, people who are not well-served by instability, generational discontinuity, institutionalized disorder — in short, what Mill calls “progress.”

Mill’s contemporary across the English Channel, Alexis de Tocqueville, understood the threats of liberation from ambient culture in precisely this light. Observing the likely rise of a more “revolutionary” class in a liberalizing America, Tocqueville wrote admiringly especially of the constraining power of religion:

“The revolutionaries of America are obliged ostensibly to profess openly a certain respect for the morality and equity of Christianity, which does not allow them to violate the laws easily when those are opposed to the execution of their designs. ... Up to now, no one has been encountered in the United States who dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society. An impious maxim — one that seems to have been invented in a century of freedom to legitimate all the tyrants to come.”

Understood in light of Tocqueville’s argument, the guardrails that limited those of a revolutionary temperament — limits that might be understood as a benign form of “tyranny of the majority” — can be properly understood as deeply democratic. They are democratic first because they are the creation of countless generations of forebears who contributed to their creation, won through hard experience, and assembled and bolstered them through institutions in order to protect the prospects of life flourishing no matter the economic or social position of the person.

‘Tradition is only democracy extended through time’

Those likely to defend a preeminent role of cultural institutions implicitly recognize that there is inevitable inequality in the world, in any number of forms — whether the ongoing presence of arbitrary social differences, or their replacement by natural inequalities due to differences of talent and self-direction — and, rather than falsely claiming that all inequalities can ultimately and someday be overcome, instead insist that the governing cultural forms and norms are the best means of securing the prospects for flourishing, especially of the weaker and disadvantaged. They were democratic, secondly, because the accumulation of customs and practices embedded in social structures acted as a break, especially upon those of distinct ambition and even tyrannical impulse, those who would benefit especially from conditions of instability and disorder.

It was for this reason that G.K. Chesterton stated his belief that “tradition is only democracy extended through time. … Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”

Contra Mill, long-standing cultural institutions and practices should be given the benefit of the doubt, precisely because they largely develop from the “bottom up” in order to achieve two simultaneous ends: foster conditions of flourishing for ordinary people, while restraining the tyrannical impulses of the powerful to be free of the moderating and restraining strictures of custom, tradition and culture. But, for such cultural forms to exercise widespread influence, the customs and norms must not merely be superficially and grudgingly accepted, but widely shared and generally embraced.

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In effect, those who ascend to positions of power, influence and wealth are “controlled” and limited by such forms — not merely by passage of positive law or separation of powers, but by the governance of the “democracy of the dead.”

Today, the essence of elite formation consists in two main objects, irrespective of major or course of study: First, taking part in the disassembling of traditional guardrails through a self-serving redefinition of those remnants as systems of oppression; and second, learning the skills to navigate a world without any guardrails.

College — especially at selective institutions — is a place and time in which one experiments in a safe atmosphere where guardrails have been removed, but safety nets have been installed. One learns how to engage in “safe sex,” recreational alcohol and drug use, transgressive identities, how to ostensibly flaunt traditional institutions without bucking the system — all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the “culture” comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods, and not the shaping environment that governs the ambitious and settled alike. Those outside these institutions also have had the guardrails removed — all are to be equally “free” — but without safety nets in sight.

Elite opinion thus officially condemns the older cultural institutions and forms while learning a new kind of internalization of norms that function as a kind of privatized guardrail, not unlike the secured spaces of those gated communities in which many in the ruling class will eventually live.

‘The new class war’

Cultures rich with norms that applied to high and low alike had been a kind of “public utility,” serving everyone in society equally, but the official messaging of elite-driven society comes to attack and dismiss many of the long-standing ideals that were encouraged by older cultural forms. Thus, for instance, media, popular culture and the education industry come increasingly to express disapproval of the ideal of family or marriage by redescribing it as “the traditional family” or “traditional marriage.” By adding the designation “traditional,” disrepute and disapproval are signaled by the elite of the liberal order, in which the merely “traditional” is most often associated with arbitrary impositions of the past that are irrational, oppressive and constraining.

Yet — as social scientists such as Charles Murray and Bradford Wilcox note — those who enjoy the benefits of advanced university education implicitly learn how to form families in an anti-culture without guardrails, depending especially on the benefits of privatized norms as well as greater wealth and opportunity. Meanwhile, the demolition of the cultural norm and ideals — both through economic and social destruction — results in the growing dissolution of family formation among the less advantaged.

A further lesson follows: Those who succeed deserve their status; those who have been left behind have only themselves to blame. As Michael Sandel has recently argued, educational “credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice.” In a world increasingly arranged to guarantee financial and social success for those who have been formed by the “sacred project” of modern liberalism, those who fail to rise from the curse of being rooted “somewhere” come to be viewed as deserving their fate.

The only obstacle to rising comes to be seen as a moral failure of sorts, particularly perceived as the “clinging” to outmoded beliefs and practices that those of superior pedigree had the courage and discernment to overcome. Sandel concludes that “meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism — an insidious prejudice against those who have not been to college.” The system that had come into existence to replace the arbitrary rule of aristocrats, he notes, “can become a kind of tyranny.”

Michael Lind has aptly described this new divide as “the new class war.” The division between “elite” and “working class” rests less on differentiation of wealth than credentials and access to a foothold and success in the managerial economy. Lind rightly notes that the working class is divided — arguably not only with the blessing, but active encouragement of the managerial elite — between “old stock natives” and “recent immigrants and their descendants.”

Without denying the reality or seriousness of racism as a scourge in Western nations and particularly the United States, comprehensive and effective proposals to redress historic injustices would have to include considering how the demise of formative social institutions and family life have harmed the working classes, regardless of race. Such considerations are studiously avoided as part of the progressive effort to redescribe all of Western history as structurally racist, rather than structurally liberal — and, hence, damaging to the life prospects of ordinary people regardless of their race and ethnic background.

Arguments that give exclusive focus upon a racial basis of the Western political divide thus end up reinforcing the advantages of the managerial classes, forestalling recognition among a multiracial working class of common interest against the managerial class, which in turn benefits from the political impotence of this divided underclass. Yet, as recent American elections have shown, a growing awareness of this common interest is leading to the gradual development of a multiracial, multiethnic working class that has potential to become a powerful counterforce to the gentry liberals who govern them from their new medieval citadels.

What can replace the disintegrating logic of liberalism? The ultimate aspiration of liberal “globalism” seeks to erect a universal umbrella over the ethos of effectual indifference. Its underlying assumption is that there is no objective “good” to which humans can agree in any time and in any place, so the only defensible political form is one in which every individual pursues his, her or xir’s idea of individual good, and the global, cosmopolitan order ensures the backdrop of sufficient peace and prosperity leaving everyone largely undisturbed. In theory, most elites today regard this vision as both potentially imminent and truly utopian. In practice, the result is a deeply destabilizing outcome of winners and losers in which our purported “nonjudgmentalism” — our indifference — becomes a subtle justification to blame the unsuccessful.

The common good

The only genuine alternative to liberalism’s commitment to a world of globalized indifference is one of common good that is secured with the assistance and support of our shared common order — the political order.

Of course, the first response of the liberal is to claim there is no such thing as the common good, since the liberal assumption is that any public good is merely whatever consensual agreement arises from autonomous individuals. There can be no determining in advance what constitutes “the common good,” since public opinion on this question changes. Liberalism is a denial that there can be any objective good for humans that is not simply the aggregation of individual opinion. Liberalism claims that any justification based upon “the common good” is ultimately nothing more than a preference disguised as a universal ideal.

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However, what we instead see arise is not a regime of toleration, nonjudgment and “agreement to disagree,” but the inevitable appearance of a new ordering principle that takes on all the features of a religion. What is often called the rise of “woke-ism,” or “illiberal liberalism,” is, unavoidably, the result of the elimination of considerations of an objective “good” from political life.

What takes the place of a public order toward the good becomes the concerted effort to eliminate every last vestige of any claim to an objective good. Instead, the political order becomes devoted — with white-hot fervor — to the eradication of any law, custom or tradition that has as its premise that there are objective conditions of good that require public support. The whole of the social, economic, political and even metaphysical order must be refounded on the basis that individual preference must always prevail. Anyone who resists this commitment must eventually be forced to conform, whether through the force of opinion, “private” power of employment and other regulations, and ultimately, the force of law.

Ironically, this totalitarian undertaking that we witness unfolding daily and even constantly accelerating is the consequence of the most fateful and fundamental “separation”: the so-called “separation of church and state.” As countless studies of this claim underscore, this “separation” was never complete, and can never be complete, since every political order rests on certain theological assumptions. The unseen theological foundations of liberalism were originally Christian: the dignity of every human life; the supreme value of a liberty as a choice for what is good; a constitution of limited government that prevents both tyranny and anarchy but establishes and protects a society in good order, peace and abundance.

Liberalism’s logic, premised on the complete liberation of the individual from any limiting claims of an objective good, eventually turns on these inherited commitments, and in their name becomes the opposite of what liberalism claims to be. The “dignity” of every life is sacrificed on the altar of the rule of the strong (economically or socially) over the weak; liberty is defined not as self-government, but a liberation from constraint to do as I wish; and in the name of tearing down every vestige of an antecedent order, the liberal state and social order becomes totalitarian.

Many today believe that liberalism can be restored to its “better” form simply by recombining certain preliberal, often religious commitments in the form of leavening private and civil institutions. “Right” liberals wish to (as they say) retain the classical liberal “baby” while tossing out the illiberal “bathwater,” urging a renewal of liberal nations by means of strengthening civic and private institutions while leaving intact the basic principle that the good must be a matter of private or sub political civic concern. The very liberal indifferentism that led to the evisceration of the institutions that are supposed to save us — whether by the forces of the market, its absorption through a pervasive anti-culture, or enforcement through the power of law — are to be retained, while claiming that by restraining the worst effects of our public indifference, all will be well. In other words, they propose to retain the basic liberal principle that has led to the baby being submerged in a corrosive bath of acid, and then suggest that the baby will be fine if we dump out the acid just before all its life functions have ceased.

There is no avoiding questions of the good. Common-good conservatism is not an effort to preserve a now-superceded version of liberalism that is based in a self-deceptive nostalgia for a largely theoretical, not-yet achieved form of liberalism. It is instead an aspiration to move beyond the failed project of liberalism as it now exists on the ground, and must unavoidably embrace a new effort to articulate and foster a common good. But rather than beginning with high-level debates over the nature of the good — ones attractive to academic philosophers who largely enjoy conditions of private flourishing — it instead begins with inquiring about, and properly understanding, what is common.

The word “common” has two equally dominant meanings, and that the two meanings contained in the same word are not merely coincidental. To be “common” means that which is shared and that which is ordinary.

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Combined with the word “good,” we can see that a common good consists in those needs and concerns that are identified in the ordinary requirements of ordinary people. The common good is discernible in the needs that arise from the bottom up, and which can be more or less supplied, encouraged and fortified from the top-down. In a good society, the goods that are “common” are daily reinforced by the habits and practices of ordinary people. Those habits and practices form the common culture, such as through the virtues of thrift, honesty and long memory, which in turn foster gratitude and a widespread sense of mutual obligation. However, once such a common culture is weakened or destroyed, the only hope is a renewal and reinvigoration by a responsible governing class. A politics of the common good makes a good life more likely, even the default, for commoners.

Thus, the common good is always either served or undermined by a political order — there is no neutrality on the matter. Emphasizing this point in his indispensable book “Prayer as a Political Problem,” Jean Daniélou, S. J., wrote: “Politics ought to have care of the common good, that is to say, the duty of creating an order in which personal fulfillment is possible, where man might be able to completely fulfill his destiny.”

Daniélou pointed to the duty of those charged with leading the political order not to deprive ordinary people of the ability both to participate in and realize the essential goods of human life. It is not enough to ensure their freedom to pursue such goods; rather, it is the duty of the political order to positively guide them and provide the conditions for the enjoyment of the goods of human life. “Religious liberty,” “academic freedom,” “free markets” and “checks and balances,” etc., are no substitutes for piety, truth, equitable prosperity and just government.

The liberal order in its foundational form maintains that the absence of constraint in these and all other domains is the sufficient condition for people to attain fulfillment. The liberal sovereign treats all people equally, assuming that radically free human beings are equally capable of achieving the goods of human life. It is the liberal equivalent of the old Anatole France quip, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

What we should notice is that it is ordinary people — the “working class,” citizens in “flyover country,” “essential workers” — who are increasingly those who enjoy theoretical liberty but few of the substantive goods that are supposed to flow from their individual choices. As a political order, we have provided them “the pursuit of happiness,” but deprived them of happiness. Indeed, a main feature of the working classes are rising levels of “deaths of despair.” Those who seek to advance the common good should attend especially to the profound ordinariness of the concept — how it can be tested especially by reference to an answer to the question, “how are ‘commoners’ doing today?” The answer is: not good.

The cure for our political disease

Even before the onset of coronavirus, reams of data attested to the economic and social devastation upon less-educated, less upwardly mobile, working-class people. Economic globalization had deprived many in these communities of the sources of prosperity and stability that made flourishing lives possible. Attacks on social norms of family, faith and tradition, in addition to these economic challenges, have contributed to the breakdown of family and communal supports, leading in turn to broken lives of crime, unemployment and deaths of despair. Elite responses to the pandemic only increased the advantages of the laptop class and the worsening conditions of the tactile class.

These breakdowns have led to the growing illegitimacy of liberalism itself. A globalized liberalism has generated a global revolution from below. As a result, western politics is increasingly divided between left- and right-liberals on one side (or, in the U.S., “progressives” and “Never-Trumpers”), and “populists,” on the other. A new class divide defines western politics — posing a progressive class of liberal elites against anti-liberal populists who demand a more stable society. Marx was wrong: the proletariat is not revolutionary; they are demanding less revolution and more conservatism.

Those in positions of power and influence have vilified and demonized these fellow citizens as backwards, racist, recidivist, even too lazy to get up and move. This has been the consistent message of an elite class that transcends political categories, and it is today the hallmark of the liberal gentry that runs the major institutions of modern liberal democracies.

What elites call “populism” is a reaction of the immune system of the body politic, but it is not the cure for our political disease. The cure lies in the development of a new elite who are forthright in defending not merely the freedom to pursue the good — and who then shrug their shoulders when ordinary people drown amid a world without guardrails or life vests — but instead is dedicated to the promotion and construction of a society that assists ordinary fellow citizens in achieving lives of flourishing.

Daniélou provides a helpful starting point. His question was, in the pursuit of the common good — the good life that is not “extraordinary,” but common, generalizable, widely achievable by most humans in a generally decent society — how do we order a society that protects and supports the life of prayer among ordinary people?

Daniélou posited that prayer is a central practice of a flourishing human life, one in which we are cognizant of a horizon beyond our time and place, aware of our neediness, humbled by our dependence and called to think and pray for others. Yet, he noted that so many aspects of the modern age increasingly make a genuine life of prayer — and these attendant virtues — exceedingly difficult. Daniélou understood that encouragement to personal piety in a world of constant distraction, technological acceleration and consumerism was not sufficient to the task. The “freedom to pray” in a world inimical to the habit of prayer was functionally equivalent to its outright deprivation.

A recent reprint of Daniélou’s classic book wisely chose for its cover the painting “The Angelus” by Jean-François Millet. The painting portrays what appear to be a husband and wife reciting the Angelus prayer (Annunciation), likely around dusk at 6 p.m. They seem to be simple farmers, but at this moment all the farming implements and potatoes have been dropped and lie scattered at their feet as they pray together. Rising above the horizon in the distance we can discern a church tower, far off but presumably near enough that the couple can hear its bells. It is a picture of simple but profound piety, and it captures a culture that points us beyond commerce and individual desire toward a wider and transcendent horizon.

Speaking of his most well-known and popular painting, Millet would later relate: “The idea for ‘The Angelus’ came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed, very religiously and with cap in hand.”

“We shall be speaking then of the prayer of man involved in social life,” Daniélou wrote. “It is in this sense that prayer belongs not to the strictly interior life of man — with which politics has nothing to do — but to the political sphere.” Protecting and supporting a life of prayer, recognizing the transcendent, acknowledging the frailty and temptations of lives threatened by a madding world — all point not just to “prayer as a political problem,” but politics as a place for prayer, since politics is how we together we seek to realize the good that is common.

Adapted from “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future,” by Patrick J. Deneen ©2023. Published by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. 

This story appears in the June issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.