Blame It All On John Locke?
LIBERALISM HAS FAILED
by Patrick J. Deneen
MOST PEOPLE AGREE THAT A DEFINING feature of America is that it is a liberal nation. In a way, that is not true of any other country—most of which have known different forms of political governance and political self-understanding. From its political inception, America has oftentimes been defined by its adherence to liberal philosophy. Conservatives such as George Will and Jonah Goldberg, and liberals such as Yascha Mounk and Barack Obama—for all their differences—believe that America is liberal, and that the way out of our current political brokenness is to restore its liberal foundations.
While people differ about how to define American liberalism, there is a broad consensus to begin with the Declaration of Independence. Human beings are endowed with rights—or certain spheres of liberty that can be neither “alienated” nor abridged. These include “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments are founded to “secure” these rights. Echoing the Enlightenment-era arguments of the Englishman John Locke, humans are by nature “free and independent;’’ think of them in a “state of nature,” able to do and choose what they wish. According to such a view of the social contract, we create governments that limit some rights so that we may fully enjoy others. It is a philosophy that stresses our individual freedom, and it defines the purpose of any public life as advancing our individuality.
“If you don’t succeed by the lights of modern liberalism, you are literally on your own.”
This philosophy sought especially to overthrow an older system that defined humans by their birthright—noble or serf, aristocrat or commoner, king or subject. It was a world in which your name was who you would be (Smith, Weaver, Taylor) or defined you by whom or where you came from (O’Connor, Johansson, von Trapp). Liberalism was, perhaps above all, a declaration of independence from any identity that we did not ourselves choose—the embrace of a frontier in which who we were was simply who we wished to become. One of the reasons Americans have fixated on The Great Gatsby is because Jay Gatsby embodies the dream of becoming a completely new person—no longer the Midwest provincial, but now the swank and sophisticated New York financier whose abandoned past is a thing of speculation and mystery, and whose future can only be imagined.
I agree with the likes of George Will and Jonah Goldberg that this framing captures the philosophy of ideas of of the Founding Fathers of the time, and that this notion of self-definition has become deeply embedded in America’s collective psyche. However, America and its Founding was never reducible to this philosophy, and had many other inheritances, practices and self-understandings that complicated and even contradicted this liberal philosophy. This includes, above all, America’s religious inheritance, including the Puritanism that was present before the Founding; the various Protestant sects that settled in different parts of the country; the waves of Catholics who arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries; the Jews who arrived around that same time and, later, escaped fascism; and, more recently, Muslims settling in new communities throughout the land. These Abrahamic traditions, in their various ways, taught radically different lessons about ourselves: including the belief that “independence” from others and from nature is not the true form of freedom, but the longing that drove Lucifer from heaven; that rights are merely aggressions against others without more fundamental duties and obligations; that human society and government is rightly ordered and directed by natural and eternal laws, and not infinitely malleable according to human caprice.
