We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emil Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website as well. Today we're joined by Patrick Deneen.
He is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
Not Notre Dame University, as he said as an epidemic of missnomer is also
for the purposes of today's podcast, the author of one of the best books
that I have read in a very long time, Regime Change. It is
out on June sixth. Patrick Deneen, Welcome to Federalist Radio Hour. Thanks
a ry, Thanks having me Emily appreciate it. The opportunity to pick your
brain is just it's an honor. And I want to start with the topic
or the title I should say, of the most recent book, Regime Change,
because buried in that, not buried, but implicit in that is the
idea that we should still have a regime. And that's at the heart of
the book itself. Could you tell us a little bit about maybe why you
wanted to title the book regime change, what it conveys about the argument itself.
Yeah, I think probably people will be talking about the title maybe more
than the book itself, which that's always a danger. But you know,
kind of interesting titles maybe get people to pick up something they didn't that they
may not realize they'll encounter. But you know that the phrase regime change,
of course, is well known for the way in which, for example,
the war in Iraq, leading up to the war in Iraq, what the
aim of the US was at that time to overthrow the regime the ruling class.
Of course, at the top of that Saddam Hussein. But I think
more fundamentally, and even if you go back and you revisit those those conversations
and those debates, regime changes is at its base the idea that every society
has a core set of beliefs and values that predominate, and a change of
regime isn't just a change of government. It's not, you know, a
different set of basis. A change of regime is a change to those core
set of values. It's it's in fact, it may not even require a
change of like everyone in the ruling class, conditions may change such that,
whether through kind of political pressure or circumstance, the kind of prevailing set of
commitments made themselves change. And the argument of the book is that we are
now and I think, at a kind of critical juncture where the predominant regime,
building on the arguments of my last book, Liberalism, it seems to
me have reached a kind of, you know, in some ways, the
kind of logical, somewhat baleful conclusion, how that we're kind of built into
it and we are in need of a regime change. I saw a Business
Insider headline a couple of weeks ago that said the average It was like,
meet the average millennial. They're a married parent with one hundred and twenty eight
thousand dollars net worth. And to that headline, a lot of people would
look and say, liberalism has not failed. And just to sort of confront
that very common libertarian or even sort of establishment democrat line of thinking, that
there's a real, you know, maybe at worst, the malaise that people
sense right now, the populism is part of a transition period. It's a
tough time for liberalism, not the end of liberalism. What would you say
to that argument, Well, you know, we can I'm sure we can
harley back and forth with a lot of the statistics that seem to us to
be the most revealing of the addition that we're in today, and so we
could point you know, I think many would point to, oh, yeah,
we have all these various signs progress and various signs of things getting better.
But of course we also have signs of things getting considerably worse for a
significant portion of our fellow countrymen and countrywomen. You know, we have rising
deaths of despair. We have uh, you know, the kind of you
talking about a sense of malaise. I mean it's being manifested in health,
in forms of addiction, forms of devastated lives, and beyond that kind of
both the economic and social dissolution of life opportunities and chances for people who are
you know, not they're not the poorest of the poor. These are kind
of used to be the kind of you could think of them as the backbone
of America, the kind of you know, the kind of working class that
you know, I think have been lionized in the American tradition and now often
among our ruling class are regarded as a kind of backward and recidivious and sort
of sad and sorry part of our country. Ones who like Kevin Williamson once
advised just rent a U haul and get out of wherever, whatever backward place
you are. But yeah, yeah, so, but beyond so, beyond
all those um you know, the statistics might marshal I view and who knows.
I mean, I can't say this is you know, this is a
little bit looking in a crystal ball, but it's also looking backwards. It
seems to me that one of the things that history as well as classical philosophy
teaches us is that society is always riven between kind of two main classes.
And this is what I talk about in the book The Many and the Few.
And we can differentiate those classes according to different criteria, but there's a
problem in every society, which is that there's kind of natural division and even
hostility between these two classes, and one will always be seeking to get advantage
over the other. And the tradition teaches us that unless in some ways this
divide is in some ways moderated or overcome, the likely outcome and possibly even
inevitable outcome unless it's somehow mitigated, is either civil war or one kind of
form of tyranny of one of these classes over the other class. And this
is the great fear in the tradition. I spend every year teaching authors,
and this great traditional authors that we think about is constituting the Western tradition and
who and who argue pretty consistently until relatively modern time that the way in which
this division can and ought to be mitigated is through something that they has been
come to be known as the idea of the mixed constitution or the mixed regime,
which is one of the inspirations for the title of the book, the
idea of the mixed Regime. And if this division is not mitigated through this
effort to kind of have this form of mixing between the classes, we can
talk more about that, then the outcome is going to be a kind of
ongoing, royling, even oscillating form of disorder in the politics. And it's
just from where I stand right now, that just seems to me to be
capture the world that we are seeing right now. So you know again,
yeah, it is. It is a kind of roiling disorder that you know,
maybe we come out of this fine, But it doesn't seem to me
that we come out of this without some kind of intention and effort, in
particular to reduce the kind of consequences of the division between these kind of two
permanent classes, which I think are really a marked marked or mark our particular
division of our age. And tell me if you don't think this is a
helpful thought exercise. But you're in South Bend or Notre Dame, and I'm
thinking of you know, an elite cadre of class traders can form a new
elite to serve the people this prescription for the country. If we focus on
someone, maybe you get asked about a lot because of another day of Pete
Buddha judge, who is sort of the avatar of technocratic elitism. How does
the mixed regime model, how does that fix a Pete Buddha judge, or
how does that make a Pete Buddha judge sort of work better for the country.
Yeah, that's fring such an interesting question. I knew Pete a bit
when he was here. We both have dogs, and so I would see
him every so often in the dog park. Have a few pictures of us
together and our dogs together in the dog park, and it was you know,
it was interesting. Was that I think as a mayor, I'll be
the first to say this, I think as a mayor, Pete was a
great mayor. I think he was a really wonderful mayor. I think he
did a lot of good in the city of South Bend. I know it's
probably I'm driving many of your listeners crazy by saying that that's okay, but
but he did. He did some wonderful things for this city. And it's
interesting that when he was mayor he would talk about things that really mattered to
the flourishing of the lives of kind of ordinary people. We have some really
great parks now that we're kind of set up or refurbished. During his time
here, he did a lot to help create a kind of more walkable,
pedestrian friendly downtown, not just dominated by automobiles and parking lots. It was
when he began thinking and looking to political office that he began, you could
say, to more manifest those features that we now think about as the kind
of technocratic elite. That he really began to mold himself or to really think,
I think, to portray himself and understand himself in those in those terms,
and also to really begin to adopt a lot of the we would say
the more orthodox positions of the Democratic Party. When he was married, wasn't
clear whether it's a Democratic Republican at all. So in some ways, you
know, I think that's a really good example of the way exactly in somebody's
what I'm talking about, which is that Mayor p is an elite, Like
I'm an elite, you know, I teach a Notre dame, like many
people in our world probably listening to this podcast, or elites. The problem
is in elites. The problem is is when the elites and somebody's become completely
or almost completely detached from the kind of everyday needs of average people who don't
have the advantages that we have. We don't have the advantages both financially but
also frankly, I think socially today, where it's more and more difficult to
have a family and to raise a family, to have children, and to
have expectation that they will have good and flourishing lives. So it's not mine
as in an argument per se. In fact, it's it's most decidedly not
an argument against elites. It's an argument for good elites, and that good
elites at some level have to be sort of deeply ground in various ways and
have a kind of deep understanding of the needs and concerns a sort of ordinary
people who don't share their benefits. One of the things I found most compelling
about this book is it's in so many ways a history book. And one
of the points you made was about the era that we think of now conventional
historian the conventional historical narratives that there's the Gilded Age was the era of the
robber barons. But that was an elite very different from our elite today.
And I found your comparison really helpful there what can we learn looking back on
the era of the so called robber barons and comparing, you know, a
Carnegie to a Zuckerberg. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to I'm
not going to speak in unvarnished praise of the of the Gilded Era as such.
But one of the things, and you're pointing out, or you're alluding
to a kind of sequence in the book where I talk about the some of
the features of the contemporary elite, so that maybe this technocratic elite that we're
talking about and when I think of the contemporary elite and I teach, you
know, I teach them. I've taught them now for about thirty years,
started at Princeton and then Georgetown and now at Notre Dame. More than more
than whatever they major in. It's the ability in some ways to have highly
portable, non rooted, highly alterable or malleable scales. That's really what you
kind of get and you develop when you're especially when you go to elite institutions,
to elite university. So everyone's always agonizing over what they should major.
And I was almost in somebody's kind of amused by this. Unless it's something
really highly technical. In some ways, it doesn't matter because regardless of the
major, you're all majoring in that one thing, right, which is this
kind of developing the property of your own mind and your own skill set.
And that's kind of the property that we own. And it's kind of interesting
today when you think of contemporary people, we generally very few of us is
going to own property in the old fashioned sense of the word. We're not
landed aristocrats anymore. The elite is no longer landed. Most of us will
never own the property that notionally we own, we'll own them, you know,
well the bank money on what it is we own. And these days
you don't even own like a record set or or a library, and you
own, you know, sort of digital rights to those things which may or
may not actually remain depending on what you know the fashion is today. So
we really do own these sort of portable skill sets. But this, this
cultivates, we could say, this results in a certain kind of ruling class
that no longer really has a kind of the fixed notion of a kind of
commitment to certain people in certain places, and it kind of leads to this,
you know, this ruling class that floats above, you know, sort
of above the surface level of what lies below them, that they are capable
of living anywhere, and thus see themselves not merely even has people who come
from from a region or from a place, but even who come from a
country, we are to understand ourselves as most fundamentally cosmopolitan. And it's in
the context of talking about this where I contrast this with the age of the
Robert Barons, which of course isn't just Carnegial that's an example of one,
but in which those people at least in the form of the kinds of philanthropy
that they engaged and was actually pretty beneficial to particular places. And so,
I mean, even close to where I live, there's a really wonderful old
corn Carnegie Library which is now no longer a library, sadly, but a
kind of reception hall where my son held a wedding reception in, among other
things. But you could say that this was more broadly, that there was
a kind of ethos of the ruling class. And again, I don't want
to engage in overly engage in nostalgia, but nostalgia also involves the idea of
remembering, and so much of what has we could say is still valuable about
the many, many places in this country, not just the New York cities
and the Bostons of the Chicago, but places like South Bend and places like
where I grew up, Windsor, Connecticut, a small town outside Hartford.
Some of the most important institutions, buildings, the societies, the opera houses,
the civic theaters, you know, all these institutions that you could say
become a kind of public utility of the people in those places. They were
built by elites who weren't just vacuumed up by elite institutions and then remove from
those places to become sort of, you know, kind of hogs in a
globalized economic order in which they would never necessarily develop those kinds of commitments,
and therefore that kind of the ideal of building a kind of institutional legacy as
a gift to the people in the places from which they came. You know,
I think of where I'm from in Milwaukee. One thing we're very proud
of is the Papst Theater literally guilded right downtown. Gorgeous. I've been there,
It's just absolutely amazing. Yeah, So again I think we need to
understand that this is the mixed legacy. I'm sure the Paps had, you
know, certain peccadillos and so forth, but those things are you know,
those are really extraordinary features of our landscape. And now when I think of
you know, when I'm sure there are we still have evidence of these things.
But so much of the kind of philanthropy that we see today really moves
now more in the direction of well, you know, think of all of
the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that get that get donated to a
universities by people who went to those universities. Do these places really need more?
It's a place that really need you know, another dormitory name for another
multi billionaire. Yeah, so another jungle gym, Yeah yeah, climbing wall.
Yeah. Tim Cook here and DC restored a Carnegie Library into an apple
store. It did a beautiful job on the restoration, but the motive was
obviously yeah, so I imagine, yeah, I imagine I'm going from a
library to an apple store. It's perfect. Well, another historical element that
you draw to the surface here is the influence of John Stuart Mill. You
read a lot about John Stuart Mill, and this was fascinating history and the
influence of his I guess perspective on the question of subjective claims. She talked
to us a little bit about how we see that in the dynamics today.
Yeah. I would say, if there's any bettan noir as it were kind
of the villain of my book, it's it's John Stuart Mill. It was
actually only rere it recently I realized he was all over the place, so
obviously was he was looming large in just thinking about what are the kind of
what in some ways the origins of the current disorder, or the liberal disorder
in particular. And what I really was was striving to do in these various
passages was to reshape and reframe. I think, how many you know,
kind of who many people who receive a kind of you know, maybe some
degree of training or education in political philosophy, how they perceived John Stuart Mill,
largely as a kind of a foundational thinker, which he certainly is,
who establishes certain kinds of especially libertarian perspectives that have become almost default, you
know, default in terms of how we think about what is the nature of
politics and in particular what is what are the justifications of the exercise of political
authority? And the limitations on personal liberty as an area where Mill is quite
famous, and he argues in his very famously in his eighteen fifty nine book
on Liberty, he argues that there should really be no limitation upon the expression
an exercise of personal liberty, speech, action, thoughts, and so forth,
unless those those actions or even those words or thoughts result in harm have
the consequence of harming another person's famously described as the harm principle, and so
this the result of this argument is that it leads to kind of an assessment
of whether or at any sort of thought, word, deed, and so
forth can be shown or proven to result in harm, and if not,
then there should be no limitation upon those those forms of thought and expression.
And so this reduces then a kind of default into the you could say,
into the political domain of a kind of libertarian ethos. And this is why
libertarians find Mill, of course to be very attractive as a thinker. But
the side of this argument that I really want to draw out in the book,
and I'm certainly not the first person to draw this out, but I
think I think it's the consequence of this side of Mill's argument are not appreciated
enough and not recognized enough, which is that Mill was making these arguments less
directed against the constraints of the government, in other words, less I mean,
it certainly includes the ways in which government can restrain our liberties, but
is real concern and he states us at the opening of the book, he
says, we've actually been pretty successful at limiting government. And this is now
a couple hundred years into the at least one hundred years into the liberal project.
He said, we've been had fair success at that what we haven't had
succeed yet is limiting the ways that other people, especially through custom, especially
through tradition, especially through religious belief. We haven't been successful in limiting those
domains that limit whatever it is we want to say. So it's you know,
we could say, you know, I grew up in a world in
which dropping an F bomb was something you didn't do generally unless you were really
really angry, and then you knew it, like when Dad was angry,
you know, you might, but otherwise you just didn't hear it nearly as
much as you hear today. I watched, you know, the last episode
of Succession. I think they counted like five thousand F bombs that episode.
It's just it's just commonplace now. And so that you could say we you
know, Mill was describing a world in which there was a lot of social
constraint, right, He's living in the Victorian Age, so there's a lot
of social constraint. And so the effort of Mill. Mill's argument really is
to say, or its core effort, is to say, we need to
overturn what he describes as the despotism of custom. The despotism not just that
custom is a way of sort of organizing society and its folk ways. It's
a form of despotism, and it's in some ways more dangerous and more insidious,
more pervasive than any government form of despotism or government restriction upon our liberty,
because it's something that so environs our everyday life that we internalize it,
this custom. And so the argument of on liberty is to say, those
people that are nonconformists, that seek to do something different from whatever custom or
tradition demand, these are the people who, in some ways should be given
the place of a kind of priority, or to use the word of the
month, a place of pride in our society. That this is, this
is what should become in some ways the default. The person who wants to
do something different needs to be protected from the despotism of everyone around them in
terms of how they think, in terms of what they believe. And you
can see how it switches the default in a very important way, in a
way that think that often escapes us. That the person who defends custom and
tradition is now regarded as the despot and the person who is the nonconformist is
now seen as that's what the norm of our society is. And so you
go from a world in which you know, the uh, you know,
in some way sorts of kind of sense that there's a kind of respectable way
of doing things, to one in which being them the disruptor, being the
person who challenges all of the you know, the conceptions and so forth.
This becomes the dominant way in which we recognize what a good society is.
And again when you think, I just watch watch advertising today, you know,
just think about how we how you know, everyone has and somebodys present
themselves as a disruptor. This, I think Mill's influence is quite powerful.
And which one last thing, This turns out to have its own power dynamic
because now the people who argue for let's say, more traditional or customary forms
of life, these people have to be constrained. These people, you know,
now constitute the despoit, the threat to the free society. And so
when we see a world in which it's now today, the people who are
deemed judgmental people have a religious faith or tradition especially, these are the people
who need to be quiet. These are the people who are not allowed to
speak, you know, these are the people who now constitute a threat to
the liberty of other people. So it's not it's not a neutral society that
Mill ultimately argues for, it's one that's going to have its own power dynamics,
right. And this is the This is really what I'm trying to draw
out those various passages on J. S. Mill, is that the ruling
class today, which I think is very much shaped and formed by these arguments,
without ever necessarily leaving ever having read Mill to any extent, has imbined
this basic sort of philosophical viewpoint, and I think helps to describe how we're
experiencing this new radical, transgressive class as a kind of oppressive or even a
kind of, as some have described, a kind of new kind of tatelitarianism.
It makes me also think of the Christopher Caldwell book Age of Entitlement,
in the ways in which identity come to become their own despots as they replaced
custom. And I wonder is in that sense is John Stuart Mill almost understood
as the grandfather of postmodernism? Are we drawing a line from from Mill to
Nietzsche to Butler? Is that, you know, is that a fair sort
of lineage? Interesting? I mean, I think you could say there's a
yeah, there's a there's a kind of logic within Mill's argument that in which
the transgressive figure is always going to be given in some ways that the place
of kind of priority, right, it becomes I often describe it as it
becomes the kind of the default way of thinking about what's the basis around which
we understand and organized society, That this transgressive, anti norm individual becomes the
way of thinking about of thinking about this. But I guess there's there's you
know. One of the things that Mill that I think Mill also helps us
to reveal, and this is a main theme in the book, is that
the ruling class in many ways is now defined by those who see themselves as
the more progressive of the society and sees the greatest threat coming from those who
are less progressed. Now, in Mills understanding, this is going to be
the masses, the many, right, So mills great fear is that the
many, the demos, however we want to describe them, the masses of
people, that they have a kind of almost instinctive attraction to this kind of
world of custom. They just kind of do things in the same way as
their ancestors did. And in Mills, you it's because they're just uninquisitive.
They're sort of ignorant. They're not philosophers. You know, if we take
Edit and Burke's argument, Burke's argument is that they do so because it turns
out that certain things work over a long period of time, and you cold
onto them, you continue to do them because a more conservative mindset is one
in which you don't anything in the name of simply let's just have anue experiment
in our society. Mill is going to praise what he calls experiments in living,
and Burke is going to say, be wary of those who want to
disrupt longstanding ways of life in the name of some unknown yet untried way of
organizing things. So how does Mill then propose to institute this change of default
from a society of tradition to a society of disruption and transgression. Well,
he proposed to do this essentially by putting in place a ruling class that will
restrain and restrict the many, the demos, and so in the domestic realm
and one of his books, he famously argues that those who are more progressed
should be given more vote, that they should be given several votes in order
to sort of combat the sort of the electoral advantages of the many, and
in the international sphere, you may just have to engage an outright imperialism and
colonialism to sort of train up the backward peoples of other countries. So he
really does talk about this in terms of having a progressive ruling class who dominate
over a kind of unwashed masses. And so to me, it's just amusing
to see libertarians who don't like wokeness and don't like the progressive despotism of our
days. To me quite amusing, if not downright alarming, to see them
invoking John Stuart Mill as they're great hero because in many ways, the thing
that they dislike the most about today's progressive agenda and its mindset arises right from
the heart of Mill's own philosophy. That's such an important point. You write
about the Macavellian means to achieve Aristotilian ends, and you sort of prescribe the
cure of aristo populism going forward, and what that might look like if we
hone in on the Machiavellian means um. You know, people will It's flesh
out in the book, and people should should get the book. But just
as a taste of how you sort of envision Machiavellian means in twenty twenty three,
what does that look like? Yeah, so I can already tell that
in addition to the title regime change, that little phrase Machiavellian means to Aristutilian
ends this is going to cause a lot of brains to break. And in
fact it's you know, this is again I'm a political theorist by training,
so I mean this in a somewhat different way than the popular way that people
tend to think. Machiavelli and means of course sounds like oh he just you
know, the end justifies the means, so like one can do anything,
one one is allowed to do anything. And I'm quite clear that in fact
I'm what I'm speaking of. It's it's in the chapter that, as you
suggest, it's called aristo populism. It's the effort to begin to sort of
shape what would what would it look to have a ruling class. As I
was saying earlier, that has a kind of it is deeply informed by the
ethos and condition and experiences of ordinary people who don't again share the advantages and
benefits of being in the ruling class. What would it be like, What
would that look like to have a ruling class that's closely aligned to the needs
and conditions and that allow for the flourishing of ordinary people without assuming that well,
if everyone can just go to Harvard, will all be well? Right,
This was almost literally, you know, Robert reichs I should say that
Robert Reich back in the day was making arguments that you know, it was
basically early versions of the argument everyone just needs to learn to program, and
that that that's kind of the answer from the ruling class. They just need
to be more like us. So when I speak of this the formation of
this new ruling class, I revisit this, this classical tradition of the idea
of a mixed constitution, of mixing the classes. And mixing the classes doesn't
just mean, you know, you know, mayor Pea should live, shouldn't
have left South Bend or something. It means, in some ways, correcting
the likely vices of each class with the let's say, the potential and likely
virtues of the other class. So the elite class has certain tendencies that lead
to vices, right, and this is true in everyday and age. They
have the tools to dominate the many. Even though we might think, well,
they can be overcome by the many, it's actually we know from history
that a small group of powerful people controlling money and controlling institutions, they can
control awful lot of the society. This is why most societies and some ways
are ruled either by oligarchies or military Huntas a small group of leads, they
have, they have the tools, they have the ability to have the ability
to concert with each other. They kind of know each other, and they
have a kind of sense of self congratulation about their condition. And this is
kind of true across time and places. On the other hand, the many,
the party of the many, the party of the demos, is also
inclined to certain kinds of vices. They tend to be often they're poorer,
which leads I'm not saying poverty is a vice, but it can lead to
certain kinds of advices, kind of condition of being somebody's degraded coarseness, resentment,
and the and that those those last two in particular lead to maybe a
predisposition. Predisposition to being influenced by demagogues, by people who will stoke those
resentments and then use the popular power to sort of government their own behalf.
I'm not speaking of anyone in particular course here, but we might we might
think of some examples from history. But at the same time, in the
classical tradition, the Party of the Few, in the Party of the many,
had certain kinds of potential virtues. And the few, we could say
would be some of them. We've already spoken of kind of elevated taste and
refinement. So concern with forms of culture, creating civic theaters or operas,
or sponsoring musicians, or art, public art, right, great architecture,
public architecture, great parks. They have more leisure. Typically, they've often
been better educated, so they've had the advantage of a liberal education that is
not you know, as famously as John Adams once said in his Considerations on
a Constitute, Thoughts on Thoughts on Government, that the liberal education of the
many was centrally important, but that would come via an elite. It would
become, you know, back in those days, would probably come through the
pews, probably come through ministers who went to places like Princeton, which used
to be a religious school. And at the same time, the Party of
the Many have certain kinds of virtues they have ordinary virtues, only virtues.
They tend to be more closer to the ground. They know sort of how
things work. They kind of are often doing the work of hands or work
of the fields, and so they're aware of what the world can give us
and what the world can't give us. They therefore are aware of limits,
the limits of that the world places upon us. They tend to be more
rooted, less cosmopolitan, which can be both bad and good. And one
of the things Polybius says, which is quite interesting, the Roman history writes
the History of Rome says, they've more inclined to be pious, and maybe
that's bound up with being in touch with the cycles of the world and in
some ways the limits as well as the potentials of the world. So the
question that these thinkers of the mixed constitution confront is how does one ultivate those
best sides of those parties while reducing the other sides of those parties. And
the answer is consistently, you need to have a mixed regime in which the
one side is limiting the bed devices of the other side while drawing out or
encouraging the virtues of the other side. And so rather than having a vicious
cycle, on which I think that's what we're in right now, in which
sort of the many and the few are and kind of constantly making each other
worse. You actually develop a virtuous cycle in which they are making each other
better. They're sort of demanding that each other be better. And now we
get finally to your question. Macuvellian means to a ristite, Macuelli means to
Aristotelian ends. There's a disagreement in the classical tradition, and the disagreement is
whether or not this idea of a mixed constitution should be a kind of form
of checks and balances. So should there be basically a kind of antagonism between
these two parties in which they force each other to be better A House and
Senate. Yeah, yeah, kind of, although that's a that's a kind
of, let's just say, a fairly incomplete version of the idea of mixed
constitution. Yeah, I mean it basically, it's saying that the elites need
to be checked, right, it needs the elites need to check each other.
But so you have But that's but I mean, you're right that that's
the basic feature of that part of our constitution derives from one part of this
tradition, which says that there's going to be an antagonism between these two classes
and they'll check each other. And the figure who makes this argument maybe most
powerfully is Nicolo Machiavelli in his work The Discourses, the Discourses on Living,
and he says Rome became great because of this kind of antagonism and dispute and
a kind of balance that arose between the party of the many and the party
of the few. And then you have the Aristotelian tradition of Aristotle in particular,
but also Thomas Aquinas, who argues that there needs to be a kind
of deeper synthesis between these two classes that actually results in a much more blended
regime in which the many and the few basically take on the features of each
other, and both classes in some ways get to enjoy the virtues of the
other class, in which the upper class takes on certain virtues of the lower
classes and the lower class takes on certain virtues of the upper class. So
now we get to the phrase Machiavelli means to Aristotelian ends, and so we
are we're at a moment right now where it's likely that the elite will not
reform itself without popular pressure, without that Machiavellian assertion of a kind of antagonist
popular power saying hey, things are really bad for us out here, and
we demand that you stop being so self serving and stop giving yourself all these
advantages at the expense of our prospects for flourishing. And that's how I interpret
the kind of populist uprising all around the world, which is, you know,
I think you're popular uprising against this kind of liberal elite. I see
it as a kind of Machiavellian moment. But my hope and the argument of
this book is that my preference is for a more Aristotelian foreign mixed constitution.
So the Machiavelian means, I hope moves toward Aristotelian ends. And that brings
me to one of the biggest questions. There's just so much in this book
that I agree with, But because I'm a pessimist, I had this nagging
question in the back of my head about whether, you know, the populist
uprising is representative of much more in a sort of populous slice of the population.
You know, people in Middle America and the rest belt who have been
very poorly served, and um, you know, that's where you see concentrated
doesn't despair, although there are plenty in urban areas now too. But I
just wonder is there a real movement? Is there a populist appetite for an
end to liberalism? Or are people sated by liberalism? Do they want more
liberalism? When you look at you know, Donald Trump, um in particular,
somebody who went really viral early on by placating Caitlyn Jenner, And this
was fodder for memes and people really enjoyed it. I guess I just wonder,
you know, is there a populist yearning for a return to Christian roots
as you write, or I mean I think there is. I mean,
I think that's a deeply human inclination. M But but faced with the alternative
of pure hedonism, technocratic hedonism, I worry that's really what people want,
and the populist packaging, um, you know, might be covering up half
of people who do want to return to Christian roots and half of people who
want something much darker. Yeah. So I'm in a very odd position of
being or at least trying to present myself as less pessimistic than I am,
because I'm also deeply pessimistic about our or a moment. And at the end
of my last book Why Liberalism Failed, people said, well, what hope
is there? Right, what what hope do you give us? And they
kind of faulted me with not having given more of a positive program um and
maybe you know, some some vision forward at the end of that book.
And so I find myself in the strange position now of sort of being accused
of being, you know, too wide eyed optimist about what the what the
what the prospects are. Um. It's with all, with all recognition of
how um sometimes deeply, deeply dire things look, and with little little,
really good prospect for changing the basic dynamic of our current condition, which does
seem to be moving. I think as you describe a condition in which sort
of our you know, technocratic overlords will will feed us, you know,
constant titillation and distraction, so that we're a little bit like the batteries and
the matrix, you know, the human batteries in the matrix in which we
feed me, give me the kinds of drugs and the you know, I
mean up here you can't even walk down. I mean, I was just
in New York, you can't walk through the city without smelling marijuana everywhere.
I mean, just kind of letting me be constantly sedated, self sedated.
And I will gladly assent to this, the conditions of deep and profound human
degradation that that that will be the you know, the kind of the arrangements
that we enter. It's there's I would be the first to acknowledge the following.
Whatever kind of populous moment we have seen and may still yet be seeing,
you can you can be certain and I am quite certain I'm seeing this
that massive efforts are being made to not just defeat it, but really more
dangerously, to co opt it, you know, to take those energies and
to basically sort of redirect them in a very safe direction in ensuring the ongoing
system is not disrupted. And I think this is being This is actually true
on both the left and the right. I think both the left and the
right sometimes are kind of in the moment, at the moment, co opting
these populist energies in the pursuit of essentially maintaining their status and position. On
the left, I mean, I think this is one of the deepest sources
of identity politics. I don't think it's cultural Marxism. I think it's really
status and class maintenance, and it's in other words, it's the appearance of
deep commitment to equality, especially in institutions that are designed to cultivate the elites.
The more elite the institution, the more certain you can be that these
are the places where they're deep committed to equality of the most loudly trumpeted.
I mean, I teach at an elite university, and this is constantly the
refrain and the kind of the lack of self awareness of exactly what's going on
is just absolutely stunning. But at the same time, the you know,
the right today or the you know it seems to me the sort of right
liberal right is you know, seeking to co op the populace energy in opposition
to wokeness, which I don't disagree with, but basically to say that this
wokeness is basically it's a form of cultural Marxism. It's a threat to the
kind of a good functioning economic order that we're all enjoying. So both the
left and the right are kind of in some ways engaged in this almost faux
battle that will result in no real substantive change that will benefit sort of the
ordinary working class people of this country and around the world. So I part
of the book, and I actually you said this earlier, and I say
this as well. What would be needed to make this populist up surge,
which has really been a bottom up phenomenon, hasn't been planned from the top.
You're actually going to need a class of elites who are going to effectively
function as kind of class traders. You're going to need a set of elites
who are going to give some substantive voice to these you know, I think
the kind of instincts that we're seeing right now, and recognizing that politics is
always going to be the imperfect vessel of this, but to try in some
ways to orient politics in a direction that moves us at least begins to move
us beyond the kind of almost knee jerk liberal responses and efforts to maintain the
liberal order, whether it's social or an economic forms, and to really begin
to move beyond one that prizes above all this kind of million idea of transgressive,
radical liberation and autonomy as the default method of thinking about what the purpose
of politics and the purpose of our social political order is. The book is
Regime Change toward a post liberal future. Like I said earlier, it is
one of the best books I have read in a long time. I highly
recommend you pick it up when it is out on June sixth, Patrick Deneen,
it's been an honor to pick your brain a little bit. I appreciate
it so much. Thanks so much for having me. Of course, you've
been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emilijashnski, culture
editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
be lovers of freedom and anxious for the phrase right wrong me, scribes Ron