Conservative Discovers Polanyi. Film at Eleven.

The mainstream media fascination with the conservative who can speak to leftists.

Photo by Jose M on Unsplash

Donald Trump is not the only person poised to reap the whirlwind from his post-January 6, 2021 behavior. The intellectuals who buttressed Trump’s extra-legal efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election are also facing their potential comeuppance. Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports that attorney and former law professor John Eastman “is fighting to save his California bar license from authorities who say he repeatedly breached professional ethics — and possibly the law — in his bid to keep a defeated Trump in power.” I called Eastman a “coup-plotter” based on the advisory memos he wrote Trump; a disbarment outcome seems appropriate.

Eastman’s potential downfall raises the question of how to assess intellectuals attempting to provide some conceptual superstructure to Trump’s oppositional behavior, temper tantrums, and poor impulse control. And the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World could not help but take notice of last week’s Politico profile by Ian Ward of Patrick Deneen. As Ward explains, Deneen and Eastman are part of a like-minded group of conservative thinkers:

[Deneen] has risen to prominence as a major intellectual on the New Right, a loose group of conservative academics, activists and politicians that took shape in the years following Donald Trump’s election. The movement doesn’t have a unified ideology, but almost all its members have bought into the central argument of Deneen’s book: that liberalism — the political system designed to protect individual rights and expand individual liberties — is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions. In pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, Deneen argues, liberalism has instead delivered the opposite: widening material inequality, the breakdown of local communities and the unchecked growth of governmental and corporate power….

That Deneen’s ideas are finding an audience in Washington speaks not only to the steady anti-liberal drift of the Republican Party, but also to the critical role that intellectuals like Deneen are playing in its embrace of alternatives to liberal democracy. Since Trump’s election, Deneen has become a hybrid scholar-pundit, lending philosophical heft and academic authority to the chaotic political forces transforming American conservatism. But as the title of his latest book suggests, Deneen’s role isn’t merely to describe the various strands of this populist tumult; it’s also to weave them together into a thread that populist leaders can use to bind the fractious elements of the post-Trump Republican Party into a new conservative movement — or, as some of Deneen’s critics charge, to lead them down the road to outright authoritarianism.

Now it should be stressed that Deneen is in an entirely different category than Eastman. The latter directly enabled Trump and catered to his most autocratic impulses. The former’s views of the 45th president are decidedly different, according to Ward: “Deneen calls [Trump] in his new book ‘a deeply flawed narcissist who at once appealed to the intuitions of the people, but without offering clarifying articulation of their grievances.’”

This makes Deneen more respectable, and yet Ward’s profile is puzzling. He simultaneously portrays Deneen as the intellectual beacon to explain post-2008 ruptures in American politics while also hinting at some quackery behind these views. Apparently Deneen embraced “peak oil” back in 2007 as the source of neoliberalism’s downfall.

What the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World finds baffling, however, is that Deneen seems to be praised so widely for serving up a warmed-over critique from the two Karls — Marx and Polanyi. According to Ward:

In the abstract, Deneen argued, liberal regimes promised their citizens equality, self-government and material prosperity, but in practice, they gave rise to staggering inequality, crushing dependence on corporations and government bureaucracies and the wholesale degradation of the natural environment. At the same time, liberalism’s incessant drive to expand individual freedom had eroded the non-liberal institutions — the nuclear family, local communities, and religious organizations — that kept liberalism’s impulse toward atomization in check.

Now where have I heard that before… oh, that’s right:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Oh, and also this:

To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity "man" attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.

These echoes help to explain why the likes of Cornel West praise Deneen. But he differs from Marx and Polanyi in crucial ways. Deneen seems to be a pure reactionary, espousing a return to communitarianism. Marx and Polanyi both rejected turning back the clock as a means of finding solutions. As David Brooks noted, “every time Deneen writes about virtue it tastes like castor oil — self-denial and joylessness.” The New York Times’ Jennifer Szalai noted in her review of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed: “Polanyi went into exile four times, eventually landing in Canada. This cosmopolitan intellectual, born into a Hungarian-Jewish family, would most likely have been highly suspicious of Deneen’s extreme disdain for what he calls ‘lives of deracinated vagabondage’ and his sentimentalization of communal norms enforced by ‘people of good will.’”

Deneen is merely the latest in a series of conservative thinkers and writers that attract attention because they can sound at times like leftist critiques of neoliberalism.¹ That kind of cross-partisan appeal fascinates those in the mainstream media because it hints at new kinds of political faultlines. The problem is that the ideas promoted by these thinkers are often more shallow than the media wants them to be.

Deneen is no Eastman, and does not deserve the same calumny; I just wish the media was less infatuated with this category of thinker. There is not much originality to echoing older critiques of neoliberalism and pairing them with half-baked reactionary solutions.

1. See also: Cristopher Caldwell, Oren Cass, Josh Hawley, even Steve Bannon for those who really like conceptual stretching.