On The Uniparty

I’ll get to the subject, but first …

This morning Big Serge had an entertaining but serious three tweet thread:

Big Serge @witte_sergei

The airport is the end state of the west in miniature. A stifling security bureaucracy that provides dubious safety benefits and is little more than a thinly veiled jobs program, overpriced snacks and a food court staffed by immigrants, long delays and malfunctioning equipment.

However, if you have the money you can turn it into a reasonably pleasant experience via access to expedited lines, lounges, separate seating areas that segregate you from the writhing masses, and alcohol.

Imagine society transformed into continent scaled airport. Being scolded by Latina TSA agent on a power trip because your shampoo bottle is too big, nothing to eat except $20 Macdonald, passengers bring animals on the plane. Possibly a door comes off mid-flight.

6:42 PM · Jan 9, 2024

That got me thinking. If the modern American airport is a sort of metaphor for the end state of the American Experiment—a metaphor for the “stifling security bureaucracy that America has become—how did we get to this point? And what, actually, was that experiment? Such ruminations inevitably lead one to the thought of Patrick Deneen, which we’ve discussed many times over the years. However, a useful preliminary consideration has to do with the idea of the United States as a “constitutional” republic—an idea so dear to Americans of all political stripes. And yet, the ratification of the constitution was, in actual effect, the ratification of a power grab—a “coup”—by the power elite of the day. This isn’t really such a wild idea. A quick search of that idea gets you results like these—the idea is out there. I briefly described this two years ago:

Are The Federalists Winning?

The last time we saw the Federalist Party was in 1816. Still, they occupy an important place in American history—after all, they led the first coup, and a wildly successful one to boot. What, you ask? Recall—the US Constitution. The proto-Federalists seized the opportunity of their leading opponents being out of the country to declare a “Constitutional Convention”, despite the US already having a Constitution—the Articles of Confederation. Conveniently, the population of the country didn’t get to actually vote on this new Constitution.

This is the Wikipedia version of who the Federalists were, and it should ring at least a few bells for those who have been following the Great Reset:

The Federalist Party was the first political party in the United States. Under Alexander Hamilton, it dominated the national government from 1789 to 1801. It became a minority party while keeping its stronghold in New England and made a brief resurgence by opposing the War of 1812. It then collapsed with its last presidential candidate in 1816. Remnants lasted in a few places for a few years. The party appealed to businesses and to conservatives who favored banks, national over state government, manufacturing, an army and navy, and in world affairs preferred Great Britain and opposed the French Revolution. The party favored centralization, federalism, modernization and protectionism.

If you want to put it in Biblical terms, you could liken this process to the transition from an Israelite tribal confederacy to the Davidic monarchy. The Israelites wanted to become a nation like other nations, with a king, and that’s pretty much what the federalists were all about.

Now, it’s true that in order to ram the new Constitution through the states, before an organized opposition could convincingly expose the coup, the founding coup members were forced to append a “Bill of Rights” that purported to limit the authority of the powerful central government that was being established. The reality is that the Bill of Rights didn’t stop the central government from becoming all powerful in relatively short order, from an historical perspective. That result, Dineen would argue, was pretty much baked into the Constitution from the start, in a structural sense. The fundamental nature of the new central government was bound to evolve toward what we have today. In fact, the people in charge of the central government—and the Constitution—quickly realized that their interests were served by consolidating power in DC. Having done so, their interest is in preserving that central control against the wishes of an increasingly restive populace. These are not jobs for a truly divided governments—these are jobs for a Uniparty, and the power elite has largely risen to the challenge. Newcomers are coopted. The judiciary, supposedly the guardian of our “rights,” is largely a friend of the central government that empowers them as an institution and relatively indifferent to ordinary citizens. The result is an increasingly oppressive central government that aggressively reaches into the details of our daily lives.

Having got that far, I decided that this might be a good opportunity to review some of what I’ve written in the past regarding Patrick Deneen’s views, especially as presented in his book Why Liberalism Failed. Spoiler alert: according to Deneen, liberalism failed because it succeeded. We’re all liberals now. So let’s do a dive into political philosophy. What I’ll do is present excerpts from the five posts in which I presented and discussed Deneen’s key ideas. These are only excerpts, so I encourage readers to follow the links. The excerpts are mostly my comments—the passages from Deneen’s book that I quote are at the links:

Why Liberalism Failed (1)

Deneen's … uses the term "liberalism" to refer to both wings of politics in modern America: progressive liberalism and what Deneen most often refers to as "mainstream" conservatism--what for many is libertarianism.

Deneen's overall thesis is that all liberalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction--progressive liberalism may get to the bottom of the slippery slope faster, but classical liberalism or libertarianism will get to the bottom just as surely because their fundamental principles are the same. Indeed, in a notable quote (see below) Deneen states with regard to the historical ignorance of his students:

The pervasive ignorance of our students ... is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide.

The civilization he speaks of, of course, is that of Western liberalism.

[Why are we facing civilizational suicide? Because the West has by and large rejected its civilizational—Christian—roots. Untethered from those roots, libertarians and progressives alike are convinced that Man’s great project is to decide for himself from scratch who he wants to be—now including gender. Neither libertarians nor progressives have convincing philosophical arguments against this madness.]

[In the next section, Deneen is arguing that, having rejected the authority of tradition and custom rooted in our civilizational past, Western man is forced to legislate endlessly—a recipe for tyranny, as the population becomes used to the idea that positive law in the form of legislation has replaced the authority of custom and civilizational traditions. As a practical matter this is unworkable, and leads to tyranny at the hands of the ruling class.]

Why Liberalism Failed (2)

The Bondage of the Autonomous Self

Comments

1) Many of us are old enough to remember when custom and accepted notions of proper human behavior governed much of social life. Now, however, positive law--promulgated law, as Deneen calls it--is virtually the sole standard in the workplace, in educational institutions, in most public life. The principles of custom are regarded as inadmissible. But positive law as the standard for human conduct is unworkable. Human life is too varied to be regulated in that manner, and the very attempt leads to intolerable tyranny. We even are headed toward speech regulation regarding use of pronouns!

2) Ironically, the liberty of liberalism based on liberalism's central anthropological claim--that the individual is autonomous--leads to suffocating state control--bondage--over the individual. That, in turn, leads to "populist" movements of resistance against the managerial elite who maintain this regulatory bondage over non-elite individuals with non-elite, non-liberal, views.

3) Customary law relies upon the recognition of human nature as a knowable reality. Liberalism rejects the very notion of human nature on philosophical grounds, claiming instead that each individual can choose his own reality. Remember Anthony Kennedy's "sweet mystery of life," lampooned by Justice Scalia? Well, that happens to be the law of the land. What that means is that if human nature is either not a reality or cannot be known in any case, then custom is in principle an unwarranted imposition on the individual. Such thinking is, as Deneen argues, destructive of all social structures in principle--and we are seeing the results. Progressive or Libertarian, the results are basically the same.

4) The vast majority of people do implicitly accept the reality of human nature and the constraints that that reality entails. Liberalism evaded this difficulty by means of a studied dishonesty, that is ever more apparent:

The achievement of liberalism was not [accomplished] simply [by] a wholesale rejection of its precedents [i.e., of earlier Classical and Christian thinking], but in many cases attained its ends by redefining shared words and concepts and, through that redefinition, colonizing existing institutions [think, especially: educational institutions and courts] with fundamentally different anthropological assumptions [anthropological = referring to human nature]. (p. 23)

[Next we see how this notion of the autonomous individual underlies the Neocon and libertarian claim that Americans are not a people—rather, America is a proposition. And propositions, like constitutions, can evolve. Indeed, the American people can be replaced by the simple step of opening the borders. But please note—this is true not merely of progs but of all liberals, including libertarians.]

Why Liberalism Failed (3)

Comments:

1) Liberalism is founded on the notion of the autonomous individual. It is therefore fundamentally at war with any notion of a nation or society as an organic unity with a common culture. It is also, ultimately at war with the notion of civic virtue, because the idea of civic virtue ultimately rests on inherited culture. The Founding Fathers recognized the importance of virtue for the nation, as Washington noted in his Farewell Address:

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

Liberalism, as a matter of principle, must reject this.

As Montesquieu pointed out long ago, democracy is the most demanding regime, given its demands for civic virtue. The cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty. In a deep irony, liberalism claims legitimacy based upon democratic consent, yet it ultimately hollows out the prospects for functioning democracy. 

2) The use of the judiciary, the legal managerial elite, to tamp down populist and democratic impulses is well documented. Surprisingly, however, Deneen fails to note the role of elite control over social media and education as bulwarks against the energies of normal people. The appeal to democracy to censor dissenting antiliberal opinions is certainly remarkable. The same censorship is going on throughout our educational institutions.

[Deneen now discusses the ways in which the atomization of society into a collection of individuals—as opposed to an organic unity—leads to oppression under the guise of liberty. This is a false liberty because the non-elites become simply prey for the elites.]

Why Liberalism Failed (4)

Comments:

1) In the book Deneen discusses at length the "commodification" of the non-elites, especially in the context of the globalized labor market. The non-elites are forced to compete to lower labor costs--their income--to enrich the managerial elite. Indeed, this concept was well illustrated in the wake of the Trump electoral victory when Bill Kristol expressed the view that it might be time to replace the lazy ass white working class--as opposed to the hard working chattering class--with "new Americans." Fellow citizens have thus become fungible--at the disposition of the managerial elite. This is the concept expressed in the view of America as a "proposition nation." Liberalism's transformation of socialized human beings into autonomous individuals leads to oppression under the guise of liberty.

UPDATE 1:

2) Two currently active campaigns of the Power Elite play into Deneen's theory. One is the Power Elite's intensifying campaign of vilification against working class whites--White Supremacists. The other, and more recent one, is the attempt by the Power Elite to jawbone the US economy into a recession. This is a patent effort to break the upward trend of wages among working class Americans. Both campaigns together target a key Trump demographic. The aim is to prevent Trump--with his non-liberal economic ideas--from being re-elected.

UPDATE 2: Scott Rasmussen provides data to back up the idea that most normal people have at least a glimmering that the Power Elite of liberalism that expands government while talking up "liberty" is not their friend. The trouble is that most Americans can only frame issues in the language of liberalism or libertarianism, which is what they've grown up with:

Why Liberalism Failed (5)

[In this last section Deneen discusses how the Uniparty regime has become the enemy of the people. Reform from within the Uniparty, he argues, is not likely. Reform from outside is what he discusses in his new book: Regime Change. But below are excerpts from his Conclusion to Why Liberalism Failed, in which he speculates on the possibility of a turn to authoritarianism by the Uniparty.]

Liberty after Liberalism

Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them. The result is the systemic rolling blackouts in electoral politics, governance, and economics, the loss of confidence and even belief in the legitimacy among the citizenry, that accumulate not as separable and discrete problems to be solved within the liberal frame but as deeply interconnected crises of legitimacy and a portent of liberalism's end times. 

... 

The "Noble Lie" of liberalism is shattering because it continues to be believed and defended by those who benefit from it, while it is increasingly seen as a lie, and not an especially noble one, by the new servant class that liberalism has produced. Discontent is growing among those who are told by their leaders that [liberalism's] policies will benefit them [the servant class], even as liberalism remains an article of ardent faith among those who ought to be best positioned to comprehend its true nature. But liberalism's apologists regard pervasive discontent, political dysfunction, economic inequality, civic disconnection, and populist rejection as accidental problems disconnected from systemic causes, because their self-deception is generated by enormous reservoirs of self-interest in the maintenance of the present system. This divide will only widen, the crises will become more pronounced, the political duct tape and economic spray paint will increasingly fail to keep the house standing. The end of liberalism is in sight. 

This denouement might take one of two forms. In the first instance, one can envision the perpetuation of a political system called "liberalism" that, becoming fully itself, operates in forms opposite to its purported claims about liberty, equality, justice, and opportunity. Contemporary liberalism will increasingly resort to imposing the liberal order by fiat--especially in the form of the administrative state run by a small minority who increasingly disdain democracy. End runs around democratic and populist discontent have become the norm, and backstopping the liberal order is the ever more visible power of a massive "deep state," with extensive powers of surveillance, legal mandate, police power, and administrative control. These methods will continue to be deployed despite liberalism's claim to rest on consent and popular support. Such a conclusion is paradoxical, not unlike Tocqueville's conclusion in Democracy in America, in which he envisions democracy culminating in a new form of despotism. 

But the instabilities that surely would accompany this outcome suggest a second possible denouement--the end of liberalism and its replacement by another regime. Most people envisioning such scenarios rightly warn of the likely viciousness of any successor regime, and close to hand are the examples of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, and Russia's brief flirtation with liberalism before the imposition of communism. While these brutal and failed examples suggest that such possibilities are unlikely to generate widespread enthusiasm even in a postliberal age, some form of populist nationalist authoritarianism or military autocracy seems altogether plausible as an answer to the anger and fear of a postliberal democracy. 

... Yet the failure of liberalism itself invites this outcome, even as the unwillingness of liberalism's defenders to perceive their own complicity in fostering widespread discontent among their fellow citizens only makes such a lamentable outcome more likely. Liberalism's defenders today regard their discontented countrymen as backward and recidivist, often attributing to them the most vicious motivations: racism, narrow sectarianism, or bigotry, depending on the issue at hand. ... No serious effort to conceive a humane postliberal alternative is likely to emerge from the defenders of a declining regime.