The Tragedy of Liberalism

Patrick J. Deneen

The ship of liberalism is in dangerous waters not because it hasn’t yet realized its potential but because it overwhelmingly has. Our political battles are likely to continue to be shaped by the dominant narrative to which we have all become accustomed—conservative against progressive, right against left. And all the while, the logic of liberalism will inexorably continue to unfold, impelling the ship toward the inevitable iceberg while its passengers bicker not over the arrangement of the deck chairs but over which end of the ship will stay above water when the iceberg strikes.

What is needed today is not better theory, but better practice. When Tocqueville visited America in the early 1830s, he marveled at Americans’ political do-it-yourself spirit. Unlike his French compatriots, who for centuries had acquiesced in a centralized aristocratic order, Americans would readily gather in local settings to solve problems. In the process, they learned the “arts of association.” They were largely indifferent to the distant central government, which then exercised relatively few powers. Local township government, Tocqueville wrote, was the “schoolhouse of democracy,” and he praised the commitment of citizens to securing the goods of common life not only for the ends they achieved but for the habits and practices they fostered and the beneficial changes they wrought on citizens themselves. The greatest benefit of civic participation, he argued, was not its effects in the world, but those on the relations among people engaged in civic life: “When the members of a community are forced to attend to public affairs, they are necessarily drawn from the circle of their own interests and snatched at times from self-observation. As soon as a man begins to treat of public affairs in public, he begins to perceive that he is not so independent of his fellow men as he had at first imagined, and that in order to obtain their support he must often lend them his cooperation.”9