Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Moler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Patrick J. Deneen is the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Deneen earned his PhD in political science from Rutgers University. He held teaching positions at Princeton University and Georgetown University before joining the faculty at Notre Dame in 2012. He served in various capacities. He has authored or edited many books including his influential work, Why Liberalism Failed, that book was the topic of a previous episode of Thinking in Public.
It is his most recent book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, that is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Deneen, I really enjoyed our conversation about your 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, and in some essence, everything an author does has at least some reference to what he’s done before. So draw a line from that book to why you wrote this book. What are you doing in this new book entitled Regime Change?
Patrick J. Deneen:
Sure. Well, first, let me echo how much I enjoyed our last conversation in 2018, and I just would mention that that was a time of extraordinary number of invitations to participate in podcasts. And the conversation that we had, I thought had so much depth that it was almost a surprise to me at that point that I was able to say some things that I was not being asked in other interviews. So I’m hoping that we will at least match, if not exceed those standards today. Yeah. This book, in many ways, it’s in a follow-up to the previous book, and if anything, it’s an effort to respond to a number of the criticisms that the last book received, which really focused on that, whether people agreed or disagree, they thought it was a powerful critique of the liberal order, but that it lacked a kind of positive project or a recommendation of sort of what’s next. And so I wouldn’t say this is a fully drawn portrait of what that might look like, but it’s an effort to articulate a way of thinking forward from where we are right now. And I think the title suggests that as well. Of course.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I want to ask you a question related to the first book and its title that I think will set the stage for turning to Regime Change. As your book, you talk about why liberalism failed, and I think there are an awful lot of people, even among conservative intellectuals who would say, well, we’re ready to agree with that, but you are not just indicting modern procedural liberalism, you were indicting liberalism and that includes classical liberalism. And so I truly think your first book was something like a shock wave sent through the system. Can you explain, after you’ve written the book now several years, do you think people got the point?
Patrick J. Deneen:
I think that they’ve gotten the point now that in some ways we’ve gone through a time of political crisis and a sense that whatever we thought of the stability of the political system in the order in the United States or in the West, the liberal West, that seems to have come to a conclusion that, whatever the imputed causes, we’re no longer in the realm of normal politics. We’re no longer in the realm of one party wins and another party loses and then you succeed one to the other. It really seems that it’s a kind of existential threat that we are faced by not just differences of partisans within a political order, but even the potential of there being a different political order or some threat to the existing order. So I think that you’re correct that in the first instance, it’s not simply that I made an argument and that the argument was persuasive.
It came in the backdrop of some significant political upheavals and changes. And so that’s just timing that an author can’t control, which in the sense it was fortuitous that that book came out when it did. But I guess there’s another way that this book had some resonance in part because of those events, which was I think a growing sentiment and suspicion among laypeople as well as some political actors that the divide between the left and the right, which I think you rightly point out was between two kind of versions of liberalism, a kind of classical liberal tradition and a progressive liberal tradition that these two sides of liberalism actually shared a fair amount in common that was becoming visible as liberalism itself was coming under duress. And the way in which there was a kind of coalescence around opposition, for example, to Donald Trump. And you began to see figures like Bill Crystal and a whole host of sort of never Trumpers, Jonah Goldberg, who would be defined as classical liberals closing ranks with progressive liberals and saying, this is the thing we have to oppose. And suddenly it was in some ways revealed that there was more continuity between what had been thought of as opposite political sides than may have been visible at one time. And that was something that my book was also open and perhaps succeeded in addressing
Albert Mohler:
Succeeded certainly in starting an argument, which you’ve continued in this new book Regime Change. Professor, if you go back in American political history say to 1960, one of the things I do with my students is sometimes make them read the platforms of the Democratic and the Republican parties in 1960. And quite frankly, if you don’t have them labeled, you can’t tell the difference other than marginal tax rates, capital gains cut, and of course the Democrats have a more aggressive military posture than the Republicans at that stage.
Patrick J. Deneen:
That’s right. Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
So it’s pretty much the same thing. And if you look at American political conservatism, it certainly believed itself for the most part other than the Paleo conservatives and a few holdouts, it certainly saw itself as an extension of the argument of classical liberty, I guess is the way it was certainly drilled into me. And yet what we’ve seen is that the society in which that framework was created has basically been transformed. And I think it’s clear that first of all, the progressives love the transformation and most conservatives I think misunderstand it fundamentally. Is that a correct diagnosis?
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah. So it’s clear that the case that our society has been transformed in ways that track very closely the hopes and aspirations of the progressive left in our country. If we think about, of course, the transformations in the relations between the sexes or whether there are sexes, whether there are genders anymore, the definition of marriage as fundamentally elastic, as extendable beyond our biological understandings and identities as men and women, just generally the way in which family has been, you could say, made into increasingly a sort of option that is less and less attractive to the next generation who see it as a kind of a burden, a limitation, a form of self limitation. And that often ends up badly in the experience of many of these people in the younger generation when they see their parents. So in that sense, I think you can see the transformation is having been following closely many of the arguments that arose over the 1960s about the oppressiveness of the family, the oppressiveness of the patriarchy, so forth and so on.
But at the same time, I think, and this tracks your, I think, understanding of the way in which this may be misunderstood by people on the classical, people in the classical I think have in the classical liberal tradition have thought that as long as there was sufficient freedom in our society, the kind of good solid family values could and would emerge in a condition of liberty. And I think that’s the dominant understanding. And yet when you listen to the language of the progressive left, all of these developments that we’ve just been talking about that I think you and I would both regard as a very unfortunate have all been done in the name of liberty, they’ve all been accomplished and succeeded in the name of liberty of individual untrammeled, individual choice and optionality and unlimited, unbounded, freedom of the individual. So how can a conservative movement, which prizes such things, as Ronald Reagan would talk about family values and the stability that gives rise to, how can a conservative movement really hope in a sense, to have traction in a world in which the language of liberty undermines the very thing, at least one of the things that of central value that requires language that goes well beyond that of individual liberty.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, this is an aside, but because of some lectures and a book project I’m currently involved in and because of front page cover articles in American magazines in the last few weeks, I have been over the last several days kind of immersed in polyamory theory and I need a brain cleanse. But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing–
Patrick J. Deneen:
I’m glad, I’m glad you’re doing the hard work.
Albert Mohler:
So other words, this is not the salacious stuff, this is the theory stuff. And you know what? It’s the same theory as every other theory of sexual, the same thing. If you buy into the sexual revolution of the sixties, you can’t fail to buy into this. They understand they’re tying onto a project and all the logic of autonomous individualism and liberation from established structures, again, it reminds me of a key conservative insight, which is that once you start this project, you can only end it by arbitrary will, not by logic.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah. So I’ll tell you what I’ve been reading, which is, I’m doing some hard work too, I’m teaching a seminar right now, which we’ve just finished a segment on Herbert Marcuse. And so we’ve read some of the works of his aeros and civilization, his one dimensional man, just yesterday we talked about his really important essay, Repressive Tolerance, which is really a remarkable piece of writing that explains an awful lot of where we are.
Albert Mohler:
Remarkably honest.
Patrick J. Deneen:
It is honest, and it’s also, it’s prophetic because his argument is that if one wishes to attain genuine freedom and liberation in our society, one needs to cease the commitment, the kind of classical liberal commitment to tolerance and rather advanced liberty by a kind of especially repression of the recidivist backward conservative parts of the nation or the world. And so we think about cancellation and the crisis of free speech on campuses. You can go back and you can read Marcuse, who’s often seen as the sort of father or grandfather of the student movements of the 1960s and see there the kind of playbook. But here’s the remarkable thing that those who would regard Marcuse as simply a kind of contemporary or an updated version of Marxism, the accusation of cultural Marxism, people tend not to notice that his hero, the hero in that essay, Repressive Tolerance, is none other than John Stewart Mill, which is a remarkable thing, right?
John Stewart Mill of the work on liberty, in which Mill argues that tolerance and openness is necessary, but not for its own sake, for the sake of arriving at a truth. And that truth, at least in the social world, comports with the most radical forms of individual liberty imaginable. And this is why you need to have liberty in a time that he viewed as oppressive. And once you attained that liberty, well then you don’t need tolerance anymore. Then in a sense you’ve attained the condition. So then you can actually begin to undo what’s regarded as the intolerant remnants of society, the more traditional parts of society. So here this is I think one of those instances where the desire simply to say, well, it’s all the other side’s fault. Marcuse, the Marxist, it’s their fault. And not seeing the ways that the classical liberal tradition ended up being very useful to those that we regard as the most progressive historicist, anti-liberal forces in the contemporary world.
Albert Mohler:
About 30 or so years ago, I came across an argument and I had intuited the argument, but I came across an author who just expressed it, and that modernity is a form of rationalized sexual misbehavior, and you get to the Frankfurt school, you get to Marcuse and folks like that, not to mention some of the others, we will not even discuss.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Bill. Bill is very important here.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. I’m not even going to describe his apparatus by name in terms of his theory, but the issue is sexual misbehavior is always back there. In other words, and that leads me to say, so when you talk about the regime and Regime Change classically that word has meant government, and you do mean that, but you mean a lot more than that in this title? I mean, frankly, frankly, no pun intended. The Frankfurt School was about regime change and that’s what you’re calling for, but it’s bigger than government.
Patrick J. Deneen:
And in some ways it’s more radical than attempting to change a government. As we know, even from recent experience, you can change a government. The United States has been pretty good at toppling governments, but it’s awfully hard to change a regime in the sense of a way of life, a culture. And we’ve discovered that in Afghanistan, we’ve discovered that in Iraq. So how do you affect a change that is much more radical? In other words, is trying to change the deepest presuppositions of the civilization. And so if what I’m arguing, what I argued in the last book is true than to the extent that much of our political horizon is described or captured by the liberal tradition, and we divide that between a partisan and a partisan left, what room is there for something that in my view is necessary as a deep corrective to a mistake, anthropology, a mistaken assumption of human nature, and that would require a regime change not of government.
In fact, most people who don’t know what I write assume that, I mean, let’s have January 6th or something. That’s a failure of imagination. It’s just not even approaching the comprehensiveness that one needs to think about. Rather, the way in which I use the word regime is hearkens back to the classical understanding of Constitution, which you would find in Plato or Aristotle. Take Plato’s Republic, which is called, it’s the Republic, is a kind of mistranslation. The actual translation of the title poleteio would be Regime or the Constitution. And when he speaks of this, he begins Books two and three when he begins describing what’s the nature of the regime, what does he talk about? He doesn’t talk about political offices. He, Socrates doesn’t talk about the division of powers. He talks about education, and he talks about what is the proper schooling for virtuous people. And so he begins by rewriting Homer, which is pretty radical. It would be as if we were to say, let’s rewrite the Bible as the necessary precursor to rethinking the nature of our constitution, our regime. So what would go into a regime change of this sort? And here, I think, and in the book itself, I think a kind of familiarization with aspects of the classical tradition would be really helpful to us. Right now,
Albert Mohler:
Your first book, I mean, of these two books, kind of this emerging argument that has drawn you so much into a public conversation, Why Liberalism Failed I would say it’s clearly one book, and when I go after a book, I have an argument and it’s pages. So in taking the second book, I would say it’s not necessarily just one book. It’s several different things, several different books. So together, so to speak, pulled together. So talk to me about what the project is, and I want folks to hear how you conceived of this as a project and put it together as you did.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah, it’s interesting in lots of ways. I agree with you because there were several books I wanted to write after this one, and I couldn’t decide which one. So I may have just written all three in a single volume, but I think there’s a through line in the book and the through line in the book is the following. So I read Yearly Teach the classical tradition courses on the history of political thought. And one of the constant refrains in the classical tradition is it’s the following that every society seems to be riven by sort of two parties, and it can take different forms and it can express itself differently, but the two parties tend to be the few and the many, and it tends to align with wealth, not always, but there’s some way in which–it’s never irrelevant–the way in which you gain wealth or property or standing can vary.
Capitalism is one way, the old aristocracy of the land of estates and inheritance is another way. So there are lots of ways. Catholic church had a lot of property. I mean, there are lots of ways that the few attained their position, but going all the way back to Aristotle, Aristotle says basically there’s lots of different theoretical regime types, but there’s two you tend to see everywhere it’s oligarchy and democracy. It’s either the rule of the few wealthy or the rule of the many poor. And he goes on to say that not only does the world tend to divide politically between these two types, but every regime is internally divided between these two parties with the likely outcome being that one will seek to rule over the other, and if possible, it will do so by establishing effectively a kind of tyranny of in which its interest predominate over that of the other side, or in conditions where one is not able to establish superiority, it will just have a constant ongoing civil war that can simply just lead to anarchy or both simultaneously.
And this is the conclusion of classical authors all the way through the tradition. You can read it in Polybius, you can read it in Cicero and Thomas Aquinas. It’s just a continuous refrain and a theme, and it’s one of course that also is on the minds of our founding fathers. The conclusion of thinkers like Aristotle and thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition is that the only way really to resolve this is either to have a sort of almost an unearthly good ruler, either a monarch or a small aristocracy who are able to overcome this difference through kind of wisdom and persuasion, which Aristotle, Plato think this would be good, but unlikely. It’s difficult to find those kinds of figures. The more likely resolution is what they call the mixed constitution to blend elements of these two regimes together where they begin to be indistinguishable from each other. So you take elements of each, you combine them so that each side in a sense gets to see themselves in the regime to the point for Aristotle to the point where it ceases to be two regimes and it becomes one. So it’s a mixed regime that’s sort of like a smoothie as opposed to a mixed salad. I use that image in the book–
Albert Mohler:
If I could interrupt you for a moment.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Some of the reviewers of your book and some of the public conversation after the book suggests that you more or less coined the term mixed constitution.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Some people need to go back to school. No, I mean, if I did, it would make me tighten a political thinking akin to Aristotle. But no, this is really just taking a very old idea and one that I teach regularly. And then when you think about where our current politics are, when people talk about partisanship, for example, they talk about the division in the nation, what are they talking? They’re talking about the things that Aristotle was talking about 2,500 years ago. There’s nothing new about what we’re undergoing right now.
Albert Mohler:
I can remember in the sixties and the seventies, and I was a teenager in the seventies, very politically aware, active, trying to figure these things out as a Christian and as an American citizen, as a conservative. And I didn’t have the intellectual categories in terms of class theory or anything else. But I did understand, first of all, even just from Scripture, the importance of order and the necessity of some kind of natural elite. The children of Israel aren’t left in the wilderness without Moses. It’s just, and then the leaders of the tribes, et cetera. But then you take it into modern American culture. One of the things that perplexed me, professor, as a teenager, was that I would see the leaders of American Labor Union speaking for the people and then found out how much they were paid.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Hmm.
Albert Mohler:
All of a sudden I realized this picture’s not as simple as it is, not as if over here you have capital, and over here you have just labor. These labor union bosses have paid a lot of money. They fly on private jets. They actually have more in common socially with the people they’re supposedly negotiating against than they do with the people they’re supposedly representing. I just mean to say, when you’re talking about a mixed constitution, this has been an intellectual problem for me from the time I was an adolescent, because it’s not as easy as people think to map this out.
Patrick J. Deneen:
No, in fact, it’s extraordinarily difficult. And if anything, in so many words to think, the Aristotelian tradition recognizes that in most cases, if you look at regimes, you’re more likely to find an oligarchy than you are a democracy, because it’s simply more likely that those who possess to use the Marxist term, control the means of production or possess the greater wealth, are able to essentially control the system.
Albert Mohler:
Is that the administrative state?
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah. Well, I think it describes an awful lot of what people now think about as the administrative state, but then beyond the administrative state, the extension of the deep state in the media, in universities, in the NGOs and the kind of intellectual spheres. So we don’t think of the universities or the media as in the government or in the state, but they are an extension of the ethos of that. Yeah. Well, and so in this sense, you can say the oligarchic aspect of our regime. We call ourselves a democracy, and I’m actually writing right now about the irony of being surrounded by people decrying and calling for–
Albert Mohler:
Threats to democracy.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah. All the threats to democracy. Joe Biden gave a big speech last September in Philadelphia in the Independence Hall about threats to democracy. When someone like an Aristotle would look at us, say, you’re clearly not a democracy, you’re an oligarchy, but that it’s more typical, or let’s say it’s self-serving for an oligarchy to shroud itself in the mantle of democracy and to claim that it has democratic legitimacy, so it skirts this problem. So in a lot of ways, the idea of mixed constitution runs into the real difficulty of how does one through the power of the people circumvent or correct or balance the threat that’s posed by this oligarchic element of society? And that’s why in many ways, my book is in many ways, it sides more on the sides of the demos than it does on the side of the elite, but it’s not a Marxist argument that argues that we can simply do away with the elite. And why I categorize, yeah, I categorize myself as more of a conservative than a Marxist, but I think conservatives need to engage in this kind of class analysis in order to understand our situation.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I was just about to say that the Marxist category of the means of cultural production and the control of cultural production, it’s something conservatives have better understand because–
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
the other side certainly understands it.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah. I think conservatives thought that could esue these concerns with class in the belief that if we, and this is informed by the classical liberal tradition, if we had a society of sufficient openness and equality of opportunity, then class differences would largely evaporate because there would be enough movement between classes, people would rise and fall. So the theory is that class ceases to matter because it’s not ossified it, it’s always subject to change and transformation. I think the experience of conservatives in the last 10, 15 years has led at least some, and I think an increasing number to realize that there’s an awful lot, even within the conservative tradition that we need to relearn about the centrality of class, particularly in as much as an oligarchy isn’t a left or a right phenomenon, it’s not automatically conservative or liberal.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. I see that right now so much in terms of the debates, even in American Evangelicalism class is there. Those who are against the current regime are declasse, out of step.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Oh yeah, they’re deplorable. Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, absolutely. And so as you look at this, you recognize some of the names you mentioned. I won’t go down the list, but they basically have entered a class identity with people who are primarily on the left. I mean, otherwise you don’t write for the New York Times as a columnist. And so you look at this and you realize, okay, so every single columnist in the New York Times has more in common than any of those with say the people that I see every day in American Evangelicalism. It is a class analysis that is absolutely necessary.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Here’s the interesting thing. You talk about how the Left historically was kind of the party that analyzed things according to class, and this comes out of the Marxist tradition, so that all analysis, whether it’s cultural or otherwise, is read through the lens of class differentiation, and again, an oligarchic element that’s controlling things behind the scenes, whereas as we just were saying, the right, in the last 50 years, I think especially because of the influence of classical liberalism tended to neglect or even deny the centrality of class analysis and the belief that class would cease to be as central if again, you had an openness of opportunity, equality of opportunity, and a kind of, again, a class system in which there was no, it wasn’t ossified, it wasn’t settled. What’s really interesting right now is there’s been a reversal in which it’s the left now that, especially through its embrace of DEI through diversity, equity, inclusion, it’s the left that now largely avoids class analysis.
And most of, I think what’s going on, and most of what explains what’s going on in the kind of institutions we were just mentioning, media, universities, the deep state and so forth, is to shroud its oligarchic existence in the language of its egalitarian commitments or with the shroud of egalitarian commitments. And this in some ways the sort of, and this sounds very Marxist, the Marxist analysis, that this is the shroud by which you hide the oligarchic elements that really define the left now, which is the oligarchic party. If you look at who are the voters, what’s the voter base, or look at the chart of who donated to Biden versus Trump in the last election, there’s a remarkable chart in Bloomberg, if your listeners want to look back at that, in which it’s all the sort of working class trades that donated to Donald Trump and it’s Google employees of Google, Microsoft, New York Times, university of California that donated to Joe Biden. So it’s increasingly the right that’s engaging in a kind of class analysis. And so there’s been this very interesting reversal that I think reflects the kind of reversal and change in our politics. That’s on the one hand, of course, deeply destabilizing for people’s expectations of what politics is supposed to be in America. But I think in another way, I think it’s a necessary and refreshing change of thinking about what’s the nature and basis of this political regime.
Albert Mohler:
Well, Professor Deneen, I think that class analysis is absolutely necessary because of what we see happening. I talk to parents about their own kids. They go to an Ivy League school, they come back, different people, their alliances, their allegiances or their identities now grounded elsewhere. You see this happen in our evangelical world where people go up class and the next thing they’re talking about the people that left behind as the deplorables. So in other words, it really does help because the one thing that describes this better than anything else and predicts the pattern better than anything else, is some form of class analysis.
Patrick J. Deneen:
A generation ago, thinking back to the eighties and nineties, it was the case that the classes also broke down in some ways, along the lines, not only of socioeconomic expectations, but also not, I want to say politically, but culturally as well, in which, and again, that you remember this well, those who were backwards or deplorables were in part deplorable because they tended to be more culturally conservative. And it wasn’t necessarily that they were conservative because of reading Edmund Burke or the founding Fathers per se. It simply reflected a way of life that there was a kind of belief in generational continuity. These were people that tended to work more with their hands or with the stuff of the world. So there wasn’t the kind of gnosticism that I think you see that’s so pervasive in institutions of higher education today. So a man is a man and a woman is a woman. It’s just clearly obvious, and you don’t put marks around truth like you do when you go away to an Ivy League school. So I think where we are now is that those who we would describe as upper class interestingly act more culturally conservative according to a lot of studies. In other words–
Albert Mohler:
They live that way.
Patrick J. Deneen:
They live that way. They’re more likely to get married, they’re more likely to have at least one or two children. Those children are likely to stay in school. They’re likely to be able to hold jobs, develop self-discipline, do homework and so forth. Those who are more downscale a generation ago would have been much more sort of not just culturally conservative, but would’ve lived that. And there, the basis of that, whatever that conservatism was, seems to have been completely disrupted and eviscerated so that they’re now struggling under high rates of divorce, high rates of out of wedlock birth, high rates of drug addiction. We know about the opioid addiction among other things. It’s sort of JD Vance’s world that he describes in his book, Hillbilly Elegy. So only in the course of about 25 or 30 years, you see a kind of reversal in which the people who had traditionally been the most transgressive are taking full advantage of a kind of lived conservatism. Those people who, yeah–
Albert Mohler:
I only want to make the point partly because it has to do with the accumulation of capital and the preservation of capital, including the capital of their own children.
Patrick J. Deneen:
That’s right. Excuse me. So, no, that’s absolutely right. So it is capital, but it’s not only capital because the lower classes, if you want to put it that way, the working classes we’re able to maintain and even have better rates of marriage and childbirth and wedlock and so forth with less means. So it’s also the accumulation of what we might call social capital or the privatization of what used to be broadly social goods. I refer to them as social utilities of things like the trusteeship of the local pastor or the local businessman or the local lawyer or doctor who would be exemplars of a kind of moral professional excellence in their communities, and what do we see that’s happened now, they’ve all been sucked out of those communities. They get sent off to the Ivy Leagues, they get identified through the testing regimen, and then they get taken out and they never go back. So we’ve left this kind of, I sometimes describe it and compare it to strip mining in which what we’re doing is the same thing with human beings as we do with coal, which is to identify the valuable stuff, extract it, process it, and send it off for usefulness.
Albert Mohler:
I think that’s very prophetically said, and I’m speaking to you proudly from the state of Kentucky where we see plenty of evidence.
Patrick J. Deneen:
So coal is–
Albert Mohler:
Well, I mean, meant–
Patrick J. Deneen:
More on the human side. But yes, no, absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
We see this and it leads, and to take your class analysis point a step further, one of the perplexities that I face is speaking of being here in Kentucky, I don’t always name names, but I’m going to name a name: Wendell Berry, and he’s famous for his supposed agrarian argument, but he’s on the social issues he’s very liberal, including the L-G-B-T-Q stuff. And you look at this, you go, okay, okay, farming and LGBQ agenda, they’re not going to actually work. But quite frankly, his identity is not so much with the farmers in his area, some of whom I served as pastor, but when I was a pastor decades ago, but rather with the kind of people who are in the publishing industry and in the academic elites and all the rest. In other words, I see that being played out. And quite frankly, that’s unwinding in so much of what called itself conservatism that really was not conservative. And by that I mean committed to the preservation and conservation of the structures necessary for human flourishing in order.
Patrick J. Deneen:
So one of the things I argue in this book is that the contemporary progressives embrace, especially of this, what I regard as really a mantle or a patina of egalitarianism, especially through diversity, equity, inclusion movements, is one way that they’re actually engaged in a kind of self-protection racket of sort of preserving their status and their space against what they perceive and rightly perceive as a growing populous threat to their position. So we really do have, we’re entering and we’ve been living in this period, to go back to the earlier part of our conversation, we’ve entered this period that Aristotle and Machiavelli and Aquinas described of this divide between the many and the few. And our politics now tracks exactly what Aristotle argues, which is that the knee jerk or the instinctive tendency will be for one class to seek to dominate and even to simply route the other class.
And I think that’s the place where our politics is, and I don’t mean this as merely an indictment of the elites in our society. I think many people who are on the side of sort of team populist also hold the view, if we can just eliminate the elites, all will be well. And what we actually, I think need is to reacquaint ourselves with this tradition of the idea of mixed constitution and the deeper regime analysis in which an elite conforms or is shaped by concerns for the common good with a stress on commonness in both senses of that word, that when we speak of the common good, we tend to think of it in very highfalutin terms of we want to talk Aristotelian natural law, but I also mean in another sense, which is if the commoners are not doing well, then somehow the good is escaping us.
And by every measure, the commoners are not doing well and therefore should be, alarm bells should be ringing in these elite circles. So the universities, the media and so forth should be spending a lot more time talking about this crisis than January 6th or whatever the most the cause du jour is. And yet I’ve taught in elite universities my entire life, and I’ve heard virtually nothing of the concern of the condition and state of the comments. Rather, what one tends to hear is a kind of dismissiveness, a condescension disdain for those backward people. And I actually document a fair number of those statements in the book.
Albert Mohler:
Well, blue America doesn’t try to speak to Red America with arguments anymore. Not only that with understanding, it doesn’t even speak with argument. It is declarations, command, Ascension, that’s it.
Patrick J. Deneen:
It’s even less arguments than it is the effort to understand and comprehend the condition. In other words, that the view of those who have been left behind, and again, I document some of these statements, and what’s striking is that it’s not just people on the left or progressives, it’s people often who are on the, at least classical liberal right for whom their condition, the condition of those who are still living in the rust belt, fly over cities like South Bend, that it’s their own fault, that in a sense they chose their misfortune and they deserve it.
Albert Mohler:
I want to put you on the spot here in a way others might not. And I want to tell you that when my colleagues and I have discussed your most recent book, there’s a series of questions I think all of us realize we’d like to ask you. So I now have the opportunity, so here it goes. So it’s one thing to talk about these things as disembodied ideas. I want to name some names here, so I want to throw out some major figure names and have you place them on a map. William Buckley, Jr.
Patrick J. Deneen:
You want me to do it one at a time?
Albert Mohler:
Yes. And this is not just as a tautology– I need for you to help us all to kind of put this on a map.
Patrick J. Deneen:
So I think I have a lot of respect for William Buckley, but I do think he was the architect, of course, as all recognized modern fusionism, which proposed this combination of libertarian economics, social conservatism, and cold war. And I think that was what’s often called the three-legged stool was inherently unstable that without the external pressure of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, it was really just a functioning political coalition, which is fine, that’s politics, demands, coalitions, but internally it was incoherent. And that incoherence, I think, has actually–
Albert Mohler:
And those on the inside knew it.
Patrick J. Deneen:
They did. They did. And you can see those debates, I mean Russell Kirk against Frank Meyer.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Which was a fierce debate, but–
Albert Mohler:
Wasn’t it historically necessary for us to even be having this conversation today? I mean, in other words, I think there’s a sense in which I, among others reading the book that I’ve been in conversation with, others would say, yeah, but it is one thing to say this needs to be rethought. It’s another thing you recognize that we can’t rethink without bringing everything that American conservative thinking has been working through. And I don’t want to be uncritical, I just want to say, okay, so here it is, whether it’s a, George Will, and I really look forward to talking about George Will or a Russell Kirk because Russell Kirk is in many ways a major figure in the background of my own thinking, Edmund Burke, I see myself as a continuation of that tradition, but not uncritically. And as a Christian theologian seeing the ontological threat, I think they vastly underestimated what they were up against. But I hope I’m making sense if I talk about William at Buckley Jr. Or even a political figure like Ronald Reagan, because none of this matters in American constitutionalism unless someone gets up and eventually makes arguments and wins an election.
Patrick J. Deneen:
But I think what’s important, at least from the standpoint of what I’m trying to do in this book, and what I think a number of people who are thinking through these issues right now, someone like Ronald Reagan is, you could say he is of course, he’s an extremely successful political figure, but he’s also the inheritor of the predecessor debates, the predecessor efforts to forge a certain vision for what conservatism should be.
Albert Mohler:
He saw himself all the time as a continuation in one sense of Franklin Delano Roosevelt–
Patrick J. Deneen:
He did that, although of course he was also having a debate with the New Deal and the results and the great society and so forth.
Albert Mohler:
Right, but he did not see himself as discontinuity with the American political tradition. He saw himself as a reset.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah, no, that’s right. Where I think we are now is in some ways where William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk were in the 1950s and into the sixties, which is the refashioning of a conservatism that, and I think this is what lies behind your question that’s consistent with the American tradition that’s not inconsistent with it, but thinks and rethinks it through the lens of a new condition. And an awful lot of the debates that of course I’ve been engaged in have been with those who come out of that Buckley tradition of fusion and the National Review. In fact, a lot of people I’m having debates with write for the National Review today, Jonah Goldberg, who used to is one of those people, but in which, in other words, there’s a conservatism now that thinks if we can just keep doing what we were doing from the development of conservatism in the fifties and sixties and then its successful political instantiation in the 1980s through today, then all will be well. And then there are those like myself who are in the position all is not well. And in fact, the conservatism that was devised in the 1950s and sixties not only seems not to have done the trick, but maybe in fundamental respects may have actually unwittingly contributed to the worsening of our condition, which gets us back to the problem of the, I actually agree, unfettered language of liberty.
Albert Mohler:
I agree with you. I just want to be Augustinian in the sense of acknowledging we didn’t emerge into this conversation as if we haven’t been a part of all this. In other words, I see all of this as I see Ronald Reagan as infinitely preferable to the alternative of, and I see someone like William F. Buckley Jr. as historically necessary in order to and fusion is because I think without it, frankly, conservatism would’ve fracture gone off into many different wildernesses, so to speak.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah. I think my own debate is far less with someone like Buckley or with Ronald Reagan, although I can be critical of aspects of what they did, but it’s much more with those who think that all we have to do is keep doing what they had forged.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah I really, don’t meet many of those people, honestly.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Oh, I feel like I’m surrounded by them. Yeah, yeah. No, I think they’re sort of marshaling their forces and are hoping at least that sort of a kind of post-Trump world will be the reassertion of the sort of fusionist combination.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I published an article today in which I said, here’s the fact we don’t know anything about, we do know the future of the Democratic Party. Frankly, we know the future of the left because they’re all there. They’re in place. The amazing thing is that it was not one of them who carried the standard in 2020, but for political reasons, they understood we need to buy a little bit of time. But if you take the age issue and you say, okay, we’re going to step beyond Biden and Trump. Well, we know what’s beyond Biden. We don’t know what’s beyond Trump. That’s an open question.
Patrick J. Deneen:
And that’s why these debates though are within the conservative world, are actually as is typically the case rather part. And even internet sign, they are tumultuous at the moment.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. But I think, and I’m going to go back to your class analysis for a moment. I wanted to take the conversation in a different direction, but I am surprising myself by going backwards here for a moment and just say, this is where the class analysis I think really comes in, because the closer you get to people who hold tenure in certain universities and hold prize positions controlled by the dominant elites, it’s amazing how much they love Reagan. Now, when they hated him at the time they paint this, I saw Reagan’s daughter, Patty Davis has published an article over the weekend on how much her father would be offended by the Republican party today. And I’m sorry, but the inner Marxist in me is coming out and saying, this is about class. It’s about commitments, but I want to take it one other direction and throw this at you. And that is this. I don’t consider anyone as a part of the conservative conversation period, I’ll just say this emphatically, categorically, who believes that a biological male in a swimsuit should be standing on a women’s swim team at a American university. And that’s where I think the dividing line is going to come. It’s ontology. It’s not marginal tax rates. Now it’s biology ontology. And I think the sifting on this is going to be necessary on the right.
Patrick J. Deneen:
I hope you’re right. I have less optimism or confidence about this only because if you’d asked me maybe 10 years ago, what will be the defining issue of where conservatism is, I would say, well, it’s gay marriage that conservatives will never to be a conservable, never be to come out in favor of or to condone or just to become silent about gay marriage. So it does seem that in America, I’m not the only one to describe it this way, I’m not the first, but America, at least in the 20th century, seems to be something of a ratchet wrench moving, moving always to the left and never being able to sort of go back.
Albert Mohler:
That’s a constitutional argument as you well know.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I mean that’s—
Patrick J. Deneen:
I’m sorry, the gay marriage?—
Albert Mohler:
The ratchet argument. It’s a constitutional argument that appeared in the Supreme Court jurisprudence, and it all goes only to the left.
Patrick J. Deneen:
It goes only to the left. But here’s the problem though with that or an additional problem, which is that it doesn’t merely affect the left. It affects the right, and the right is always in some ways defending the position that the left just abandoned to move further leftward.
Albert Mohler:
But then I don’t think they’re conservatives. That’s where the distinction between the right and conservatives, because the right is merely comparative. But Thomas Sowell made the distinction, I think absolutely crucial between the constrained and the unconstrained worldviews basically. So where liberalism is unconstrained, and by the way, I don’t think he saw non-binary identity coming there, but it was unconstrained and the right is constrained. Well, I think what you’re talking about are those who want to be just slightly more constrained than the far left, and they understand it as a matter of time. And this is where they sometimes will throw out Burkian a insight such as the change in manners over time. Well, the change in manners is not the change in ontology. Right?
Patrick J. Deneen:
That’s true. But it’s not unconnected. It’s not unconnected because the change in manners has a lot. So I often think of a line that occurs in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, in which he says, the really intriguing line in which he says, Americans that say liberal Democrats will be opposed, will find forms to be abhorrent. They will always be opposed to forms. And what did he mean by that? So forms are that which create a shape or are a shape that in one sense, in my coffee mug here, that’s a form and it keeps the coffee in my mug and not on the table. But we could spin this out that forms are all of the ways that, especially in nature, but also not in nature, that we draw distinctions. So you’re dressed in a nice jacket and tie, I am business casual. We would say you are more formal. That’s one way we speak, and I’m more informal. And if I was my students, I’d be wearing a hoodie. And the tendency or the ratchet wrench is to move toward the informal in liberal democracy. So the same mechanism that leads us to become, to have informal Fridays or informality and address that’s hey, you–
Albert Mohler:
Which is seven days a week now, by the way.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah, it is it seven days a week and not to be addressed as professor or doctor, but as Patrick or hey, you or dude. All of these are manifestations of the same phenomenon that leads to absolutely leads to the decry of borders. That’s a form, right? To have a nation as a form. It leads, leads to the decry of religion as opposed to spirituality, liturgy, as opposed to just simply feeling an emotion that I have or a connection or spirituality that I have. And of course, it leads to the denunciation of the idea that there’s somehow in nature a man and a woman. So it seems an odd thing to claim, but the move toward informality is not disconnected in the deepest philosophical form distinction, the blurring of distinctions or the elimination of distinction.
Albert Mohler:
I agree with you entirely, but that is not what the kind of soft right argues, they argue precisely that you can change the manners without changing the metaphysic. But now they’re agreeing to change the metaphysic is my point. In other words, if all you want to be is less unconstrained than the other guy, you’re still unconstrained. And that gets back to I’m a theist as you are. And so I just don’t believe that there is any lasting grounding of that constraint–
Patrick J. Deneen:
Which is why I would say that while we might think now that the outer border or limit of unconstrained would be denying the difference between a man and a woman and having a man on a swimming platform–
Albert Mohler:
Well, you have transhumanism.
Patrick J. Deneen:
I suspect. Yeah, I suspect there’s always going to be a further border. There’s always going to be some limit to be exceeded, at which point the soft conservative, the soft right, would say, okay, we can live with the man on top of the women’s diving platform, what we will oppose the transhuman. So I would like to be with you in saying that this is the dividing line, but I here we get back to–
Albert Mohler:
I just want to push back it is the dividing line. I don’t recognize anyone on the other side as a conservative agree. And I will speak and say I am willing to withdraw from the larger society if necessary to maintain the distinction between male and female.
Patrick J. Deneen:
All I’m saying is that I’m a conservative in that I don’t recognize, for example, no fault divorce as a conservative position, but we are now so far beyond that that no conservative is talking about that as a kind of front burner election issue or a front burner social issue. And so all that I’m saying is that we need to see–
Albert Mohler:
It was in a major address I gave this week. Where I tried to track the problem to contraception and to the emergence and normalization of birth control with no fault divorce. It–
Patrick J. Deneen:
Started to sound like a Catholic, Dr. Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I have written on this subject for Catholic publications, but as a Protestant, as a Protestant. And so it is not exactly the same position. I understand, but it is very similar in terms of its understanding of the fact that if you liberate people from marriage, guess what? If you liberate sex in marriage, you liberate marriage from its many goods, then quite frankly you’re destroying marriage on just a slower timetable.
Patrick J. Deneen:
So I would frame this in the following way, that a society that recognizes the reality of the created order and that the created order is an order that constraints because we are part of the created order. We are not creators, we are creatures. We have been created. So an order that recognizes that also can live with, to a greater degree, can live with also certain arbitrary forms of constraint. Because things like calling me Mr. or calling someone else misses or doctor or wearing a tie as opposed to a cavat or a bowtie, these are somewhat arbitrary forms of constraint and formality, but they are reflections of a recognition that we exist in a world of forms. I would say that the left mentality is the following, that because there are arbitrary forms of distinction, therefore all distinction is unjust. Even natural distinction is unjust.
So the conservative, it seems to me is willing and indeed embraces to an extent the ways that we create formalities, the liturgies, the form of dress, the form of address and so forth, curricula, et cetera, which can be different. But nevertheless, which reflect something true about the world and the left mind, the radical mind, the revolutionary mind. It’s ultimately goes to a denial of the idea that we are created, that we’re creatures. And I think if you want to talk about what’s conservatism, it’s the acknowledgement that we are creatures as opposed to the illusion that we’re creators.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t want to speak just institutionally here, but every man in the room with me and in the control room and all the rest are also in coat and tie. Manners create a certain context. And I will just say it’s not just about preference. And that’s exactly the point you’re making. It’s not just about preference, it’s about expectation. People behave differently in a coat and tie than they do dressed differently. And the loss of this, I think is a denial of a central conservative insight that everything we should do should speak of commitment and aspiration, and that includes the shoes we wear. That doesn’t say there’s not a place for athletic shoes. That’s not the point. But it is to say there is something to be gained, and there are signals that are sent. And you know what? People come on this campus, they appreciate that, and I appreciate the fact that they do.
Patrick J. Deneen:
I’m told by my students that I’m one of the few faculty now at Notre Dame that wears a coat and tie and pocket square and sometimes a pocket watch. And my vest that I’m one of the few on that. I’m one of a few on campus, and that many students appreciate it, and I tell them do.
Albert Mohler:
And so a Baptist wants to say, well, if that’s true of Notre Dame for crying out loud.
Patrick J. Deneen:
I know.
Albert Mohler:
Then where is their hope?
Patrick J. Deneen:
Well, there’s always hope. I’m not optimistic, but my students tell me. My students ask me why I do that. And I said, it’s a sign of respect for you that I am not trying to be a dandy. I’m trying to show you that we’re doing something serious and I take this seriously and I wouldn’t dress any other way. I wouldn’t dress like I’m sitting in my living room watching a football game if I’m coming to class and we’re learning together. So I think if you convey that, they begin to understand and sympathize with why these forms are of central importance to our human civilization.
Albert Mohler:
One of the great virtues of your most recent book, Regime Change is that frankly, it raises so many questions that defy any brief summary or encapsulization in a conversation like this. I deeply appreciate the generosity of your spirit and time in this. I want to end in an unusual way by asking you if you’re speaking to me as you are, and we know who we are, both of us, what do you think is the hardest question you would pose to me? In other words, or to American evangelicalism, American confessional Protestantism? What is the hardest question you would pose? What is it that we’re not seeing?
Patrick J. Deneen:
Well, I guess here I would ask a question as a Catholic to someone who I, having spoken to now twice for some length, I find to be very much a kindred spirit. And yet when I engage in a critique of liberalism, it often seems that by extension I’m engaged in a certain critique of Protestantism as well. In other words, the tendency toward fragmentation of individualism of self-assertion of a concept of the human being that begins at the level of the individual and the individual exercising choice as the primary self understanding how much of liberalism can be ultimately sort of separated from Protestantism. And is Protestantism, is it a resource? Is it a corrective? Can it be? Or is it ultimately faded to travel the route that so much of your fellow, fellow Protestants have traveled, which is toward a kind of very soft progressive expressivism form of faith or worse? And this is something I worry deeply about because if you and those who believe such as you are not the source of renewal in America, I’m not sure that the remnant Catholics who are still Catholic are going to be able to pull us over the finish line either.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I don’t think you’d be surprised. I am a confessing confessional Protestant, and by the way, I did part of my doctoral study in a Roman Catholic institution studying Roman Catholic theological method. So I say this with respect. I think that the problem with part of that is that the Roman Catholic Church has not maintained what the project and authority that it had claimed. I’d say Pope Francis is a pretty good response by any conservative Protestant to all this. And I don’t say that dismissively, and I don’t say this without a sense of tragedy, but I just want to say I think the renewal that’s coming, at least in confessing Protestantism, is the understanding that the excesses of a Protestant individualism are just as fatal as Protestant liberalism. And so one the happiest things, if I could encourage you, is that among my tribe, it’s the recovery of a very thick ecclesiology. And we can have great ecclesiological debate here. That’s not the point, but it is the recovery of a deep ecclesiology that requires a primary commitment that’s very different than the mainstream Protestantism into which I was born. I hope that makes sense and maybe a word of encouragement.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah, no, I take it as such. No. Look, I am fully aware of the shortcomings of my own tradition, certainly in recent years. For me, I’m always keeping my eye on the positive faith, and on days where things might seem to be a little weak, I can open up my time as Thomas Aquinas and poke John Paul II and find an awful lot there, as I’m sure you can in your tradition as well. So I think of us who are grounded in a tradition, those of us who are grounded in a tradition will always have resources.
Albert Mohler:
And I don’t know how much the folks at Notre Dame are interested in the conversation going on here, but I can guarantee you that, and this is the biggest such institution there is, I think you’d be encouraged to know the kind of conversations that are going on here, which include the conversation about the very things I think that would animate you. And that’s why when we are together in a conversation, I think it gives me great hope. And I just want to tell you as a threat or a promise, there are an awful lot of young Protestant conservatives who are a part of this conversation and want to be.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Yeah, I certainly see it as a promise, and moreover, I find it encouraging that maybe because of the unfortunateness of our times in conversation with you, I find much more of a kindred spirit than maybe our grandparents might have. So that’s a happy consequence of maybe sorrowful times that we live in.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and it is also something that I believe makes me more faithful, even as a confessional Protestant in thinking these things through honestly, carefully, and as a part of a march, much larger and longer conversation that might otherwise be realized. I want to thank you for contributing to that today. I’m thankful for you and your work and for this conversation today. And I want to commend for reading Professor Deneen’s latest book Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future. Read it and join the conversation. Thank you. Thanks again, professor.
Patrick J. Deneen:
Appreciate it. Thanks.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, professor Patrick Deneen for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find about 200 of these conversations@albertmower.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbs.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boyce college.com. Thank you for joining me today for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.