7.21.24 - Book Review of Regime Change by Patrick Deneen
Note: there are alot of typos here because I write it straight in the HTML file really fast. Just part of the charm. May fix later.
So I finally read Regime Change by Patrick Deneen. Before I talk about that book, I’ll start by saying that Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is one of the most important and formative books I’ve ever read.
It’s a funny story, I was 19 years old, finished sophomore year of college, and if I recall correctly, I was in the public library of my hometown. I had just learned introductory economics from a pretty libertarian professor, I had taken all my intro poli-sci classes from a typically liberal professor. The whole woke backlash had started and I was exposed to that content via Youtube and such. I was working for the democratic party at this point.
I very randomly saw the spine of the book title when I was walking around the political science section of the public library, and it was provocative enough for me to pick up. I think I read it cover to cover in just a couple of sittings. It was one of those books you read and you’re just shaking your head thinking “exactly!” It perfectly articulated and verbalized a nagging sense of things you thought were wrong, that the current way of describing politics isn’t allowing you to diagnose the problem properly.
Deneen’s talking about the right and the left wings of politics as dual ends of the same atomizing force is a somewhat banal point in the era of realignment, its something that I think has penetrated the popular consciousness. But it felt revelatory when I was reading it. It was really cathartic.
I showed it to my friends, one of them says to this day it was the most important book he had ever read.
This is all to say a) I really respect Deneen and he is really foundational to how I think about the world b) any criticisms I have of his new book are against this background of immense respect.
I’ll give thoughts about the book in its three parts, because they all deserve separate analysis.
Part I: Our Cold Civil War
So this section is something of a rehash of his first book, and I think people just getting into his work would appreciate it.
Chapter 1 summarizes those arguments on why liberalism has failed. It references other important books in the genre that I think everyone should read, particularly Coming Apart by Charles Murray which I think is one the best books I’ve eve read.
He talks a bit about what other political scientists call “negative polarization” in his section Know Your Enemy. Nothing ground breaking there.
Chapter 2 summarizes some coming talking points on the right about the managerial elite, what’s sometimes called Woke Inc. Nice interweaving of Tocqueville to put what feels like a very topical conversation in historical context. But again, nothing groundbreaking. The elites are placeless, out of touch, reproducing a global economy that works for their type of fungible placeless skills, talk about equality but are produced by extremely meritocratic and inegalitarian mechanisms—— all very familiar points for the kind of person who would pick up this book, I think at least.
Overall, I was a bit underwhelmed by Part 1. Probably because a lot of the things that were novel to talk about in 2018 are just part of the zeitgeist now. You’ll hear these points on Joe Rogan, on the campaign trail of Vivek Ramaswamy, you’ll see twitter threads on it.
But I think to a lay person who isn’t so immersed in the dialogue of the commentariat, it’s a great and comprehensive survey of the conversational landscape on the new right.
Part II: Common Good Conservatism.
So, I’ll start by saying that just as in Why Liberalism failed, Deneen’s greatest strength in Regime Change again seems to be re-jigging concepts and categories so we can start more meaningful conversation. Basically, he takes pains to start the book by getting away from the usual right-left, liberal-conservative, framing, and that takes a good deal of real estate in the book. Surely eye opening for a normie, if not a political science student.
I enjoyed this section a good deal, I liked the theme of trying to develop a non-relative account of what being “conservative” means, and it has a really great overview of classical political thought from Mill to Marx.
When he gets the section “ The Modern Nonprogressive Alternative: Common-Good Conservatism” I think the book really picks up some steam. Now he’s trying to innovate and define a political project. This is why I bought the book!
So what is Common Good Conservatism, to Deneen? Here are my takeaways:
- It believes that traditional values are like public utilities that are important for social life, and for helping the bottom rungs of society live richer lives. Just like progressives believe in welfare to help everyone and create an income floor, conservatives believe in providing a cultural floor so that people don’t like destroy their lives and communities. I’ve always liked these arguments and it’s good to see it summarized here.
- Conservatism isn’t about slowing down liberalism it’s about opposing its premises, specifically the ideology of progressivism. Makes sense. Progress isn’t an objective, stability and reproduction of cultural institutions is. Very nice.
- The modern agenda is, to boil it down, is to democratize institutions so they are better connected with the “wisdom of the people,” and the cultural norms and knowledge they have organically created overtime—in opposition to governance by the experts and the managerial elite
So far, not a radical redefinition. Have heard these arguments in National Affairs and all that before. But a helpful one.
With that, I think the book exits its “definitional” section.
Now so far, you can tell my main critique is the lack of novelty. But again, that’s because him and his colleagues have really entered the zeitgeist in a big way. The commentariat and weirdos like me who read this stuff know their diagnosis. Many of us agree. So he has a higher burden to make prescriptions I think.
In the chapter Wisdom of the People, we start to see some of his ideas tie in with current events. I like the use of the Covid Pandemic to illustrate the failures of governance by expert. The use of Plato and Aristotle to illustrate the opposing arguments for expert and people rule, respectively, was neat. I really liked the points on traditional knowledge, and how conservatism is rooted in the belief of bottom up cultural generation. I didn’t know much about Disraeli, and I liked learning about how he developed conservatism from Burke.
As a law student, this section made me think about how, in general, conservative justices seem to tap into the common law tradition in their opinions a bit more, whereas liberal justices are more focused on the statute and its democratic legitimacy. Again, these are rough, imperfect associations, but I think they’re there. Progressives often see the statute as a more legitimate force of law, whereas conservatives see greater legitimacy in the accumulation of decisions in the common law. I’ll add to this another day.
I also liked the whole idea that cultural norms and traditions are a “general bank” of value. Schumpeter gets to this idea in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, where he talks about how Capitalism will create the conditions for its own end by changing the culture it relies on (Deneen doesn’t reference this book, as far as I remember, but it really has a lot of his arguments in it).
But again, at this point I’m hungry for something NEW. I was skimming through it all impatiently.
Now, the most interesting argument, that I wish he developed more, was the one he begins in integrating knowledge, where he talks about the problems of specialized expertise in an atomized, expert led economy and society.
Now I’ll take an extended moment to address this. This is, I think, a way bigger deal in our world today than people acknowledge. At some point I remember that Tyler Cowan, when he was talking about “The Great Stagnation” back in the day, suggests that maybe this is the reason that we haven’t seen intense productivity gains——the modern way of knowledge generation is really good at noodling on the margins but not at moonshots. Today we may not create or reward a lot polymath John Nash types. Instead Johns Hopkins and MIT create a lot more people who are good at say, algorithmic trading, than we would have seen in the past.
The benefits of specialization, at least in the field of the INFORMATION economy, might be sort of a parabolic curve, where we get more and faster innovation up to a point, but after a certain point the costs off specialization——increased friction and lag of communication between different disciplines, less frequent integration of cross-domain knowledge, etc.——outweigh the efficiency benefits. If you look at how bureaucracy in any office functions, you can get a sense of that. I think this ties in with Deneen’s story of elite overproduction really nicely (introduced by Peter Turchin some years back, I believe) but he doesn’t explicitly make that connection.
On connecting the overproduction story with the specialization story, maybe we have this intense specialization at least partially because we have so many fucking people in academia and the “cognitive elite”. And for any individual to be competitive in this saturated environment you need to specialize. Same dynamics that make it so that the best way to make it big on Tik Tok is to have an extremely specific gimmick, that you repeat over and over and over.
But in the aggregate (for both innovation and online entertainment) this is a bad equilibrium. Having a lot of highly specialized people may actually be in-net less productive, and less innovative, than having half of that set of people who are slightly more interdisciplinary. I’m thinking about the fact that a man like John Nash or Von Neumann could have such an insane interdisciplinary output back in the day. If those men were alive today, would they become too specialized to even do that?
I think its a similar thing that we’re seeing with supply chains (he also talks about this briefly), where it seems more efficient to really diversify them, but it turned out there were all these hidden costs and at some point supply chain length adds more costs then benefits. More room for error, more risk, more fragility, less quality control. But at the same time, longer supply chains employ more people.
Could both of these phenomena be labor-supply driven? The need and incentive, in a capitalist economy, to employ people as resources, leads us to adopt workflows that just employ more people? Generally economics likes to think of processes as becoming more efficient, as technology driving firms to employ less people. I think something else is going on, and I need to write about it elsewhere. Is the phenomena creating a lot of third rate academics the same one that’s causing us to make shitty manufactured goods, like the fact that we can’t build toasters or refrigerators like we used to? But we just have a lot of cheap ones?
There’s something to that, and I want someone to really dig into it out there. It’s in the antitrust and supply chain conversation for sure, but has anyone really measured how much cognitive resource we’re wasting with intense specialization? I’ll have more thoughts on this another day.
Anyways, that’s one of the richer areas where he doesn’t spend too much time——not a critique, because it wasn’t the point of the book, but I feel like the problems of specialization in a liberal society deserves several books. But he has nice observations, and makes a marxian connection to how intense specialization alienates and reduced the capacity for individual laborers. I like this point, and I think there’s a good argument to be made that at some point, the supposed aggregate benefits of specialization is overweighed by the diminishment of individual human capital. Eventually, that diminishment of human capital probably shows up in something like rate of productivity gain.
His chapter on a Mixed Constitution is a nice overview of the history of the idea, and is really there to set up his policy arguments in the next section, which I was the most excited to read. Again, well written, informative, but wanted to get to the prescriptive stuff.
PART III. What is to be done?
This is where I got excited. In the beginning chapter, Aristopopulism, he expands on his ideas for implementing a “mixed constitution.” I liked his observations here, and I really liked the data on donors to Biden and Trump, breaking down the professions that donated to each. I actually had no idea that the realignment of both parties constituencies was so captured in the donor data (workers and entrepreneurs donate to Trump, white collar professional at big companies donate to Biden).
Now, I think he does a leap here, where he suggests that this dynamic reflects a classical mode of politics——oligarchy versus demos——that the founders specifically sough to avoid. His prescriptions after this sort of rest on the assumption that, if institutions remains the same, we’re entering this status quo where the top cleavage in American politics is class.
Now, it is true that the country is depolarizing on race and identity, marginally, and polarizing by EDUCATION, which is aligned with something like social class. Ezra Klein had a great podcast about this some months back——just checked and it was January——with Ruy Teixeira. Worth a listen. But yes, educational polarization is one hundred percent the DIRECTION of change.
But the parties are both still heterogeneous based on income, with different slices of the working class. The changes are directional, not absolute, and they aren’t super long-lived. There are rich Republican voters, and the income data still shows they get a higher share of higher income voters. Democrats still have a reliable base of poor minorities. Look at the Pew research, not just the donor data, which will skew towards more-engaged, higher information voters, and probably exclude newer Americans (my guess I didn’t check).
And not to mention, that the parties will doubtlessly adapt to the changes in their electorate and now allow themselves to move too far in any direction into the future. We shouldn’t extrapolate a trend that’s existed for maybe a decade or less farther into the future. Mitt Romney was 2012.
After the Mckinley’s Republican Party, we had Teddy Roosevelt. Not too long after Roosevelt, we had Harding. The Republican Party has had a populist moment in the past, but bounced back into shape as a right of center business friendly party. There’s more inertia in the parties than people give credit for, and these transformations aren’t necessarily permanent. Obviously, the Democrats aren’t a Jacksonian party today, so sometimes they sort of are.
The Republicans won’t give up the rich suburbs they need in swing states for long, the electoral math doesn’t allow it.
It’s also very unlikely that Democrats will resign themselves to being a professional class party. Their activist class and their intellectual class are both responding to it already. The strategy will change in the next few years. We already saw it change between Biden and Hillary. And the vibes in the party elite are to nominate a person like Whitmer in the future, not a Buttigieg.
In short, the incentives that democracy creates means that it’s quite unlikely that these changes will go on in one direction for too long. Both parties have strong incentives to be big tent, class-mixed parties. And that’s good.
Deneen, in his usual polemic style, is just extrapolating far too much. I severely doubt that our current institution will lead us to a permanent “mass and elite” dynamic. Rather, we’ll just see the usual trading of coalitions between the parties over the long-run, and those coalitions will probably stay “mixed.”
So now, I’ll look at his actual policy proposals. He talks more about blending, class-mixing, all well and good. These are this concrete ideas to fix things:
* Expanding the House of Representatives.
I think he makes a great and historically rooted argument here. It’s a great idea, I had heard it before, and I think It was in Vox. I did a lookup and it was in Vox, the case has been made in the American Enterprise Institute, and by a liberal columnist in the WaPo. So a conversation very much being had within the “liberal” framework!
This isn’t to say that he isn’t making a great case, and I like how he tied it to the super-zips data by Charles Murray, but if his policy proposals are being presented by pretty mainstream liberals, it undercuts the idea that its part of a very novel “Common Good Conservative” movement that’s against liberalism’s premises. Moving on.
* Breaking up D.C.
Same point as above. Familiar idea, I agree with it. It’s good and we should do it. I think Andrew Yang and a couple of Democrats in the 2020 primary supported this idea.
* Dealing with Growth Poles
He takes a lot of words to say that we need regional development strategies and to break up superstar and “growth pole” effects.
Again, these are arguments that you saw in the Economist after 2016, and hear from Elizabeth Warren. It’s not consensus shattering. The need for regional development is a very popular idea I’m pretty sure.
* Representation of Estates (or class factions)
Well trodden ground, represented in Europe, and reflected in Democratic voices calling for sectoral bargaining. I like the idea of worker representation on the Fed.
* New forms of National Service. I like this idea of making college students do stints in underserved communities. It’s really great. The first time I heard it proposed seriously is in “Can American Capitalism Survive?” By Steven Pearlstein. He was a business editor for the WaPo.
* Stopping Elite Overproduction.
Deneen has the diagnosis here but no solutions. Everyone likes trade schools and people have been talking about making them better for a long time. Been a long-standing conservative tallking points, and often you’ll hear Democrats talk about it too.
The real solution here is pretty boring, it’s about the subsidization of education that Bryan Caplan, a super Neo-liberal, talks extensively about in his book The Case Against Education. We have too many elites because we subsidize it.
I think the basic solution here is that we have to subsidize EDUCATING more than getting an EDUCATION. Most of the people getting graduate degrees are going to be shitty academics, but would be better teachers than we have today.
If we just redirect the money that we use to subsidize elite overproduction into public education, we could probably make teaching a higher-status profession that attracts smart people. If you doubt this, look at latin America and India and see the ridiculous jobs they’ve managed to make high-status there. Being the guy who counts people’s bus tickets is actually a high-status job in India because the government pays them a lot, relative to what the market would.
Again, I really think overproduction is just a money issue. We need to pay people a lot more to be teachers; he gets to this point, but in broader terms.
* Reviving Manufacturing
Yes, this is what the Biden administration is trying to do. It’s the new “Washington Consensus.” Jake Sullivan gives a speech about it. The department of commerce is on board with it. Our new trade policy is centered around it. This is what the Inflation Reducation Act was all about! So we’re repeating Democratic Party and Deep State platforms here.
* Supply Chain Resilience
No points here that haven’t been talked about by the parties above or the Chamber of Commerce or the American Enterprise Institute. It’s the new liberal consensus.
* Immigration
No novel contributions. And frankly I think that for natioal revival, we need a lot more immigrants. A lot.
* Centering Christianity
Sure. I like more public holidays. Revitalization of public spaces is good. Why do we have to put this in the context of Christianity? These programs fit comfortably in a pluralist framework. —
Anyways, the last chapter was nice on seeing this all as an agenda to combat disintegration was good, I appreciated it, he writes beautifully. No one is saying the observations, the integration with history and classical political history, the diagnosis of where society at, isn’t best in class in the genre.
But I left the book disappointed. This is the moment when Deneen’s intellectual movement has really “arrived.” J.D. Vance is the Republican VP. Amy Coney Barrett of Notre Dame is on the Supreme Court. Trump will probably be president. The neocons are gone. This faction of the right——which I’ve always preferred to their predecessors——will wield power, if not this election, then very very soon.
And the movement is presented as something completely transformative! A complete rejection of LIBERALISM itself! A radical remake of the conservative movement.
But when you look at the concrete policy proposals, it’s just not novel at all. They’re good, common sense, have been talked about. It’s good that the Republicans are joining the conversation on them.
And that’s where I think it gets me a little annoyed. The conservative movement is really just re-entering a mainstream conversation. That’s the story here.
For decades they were this insane, Ayn Rand, libertarian, Paul Ryan, radical movement, completely divorced from the reasonable policy conversation being had by other liberals and the left-of-center thinkers on how to upgrade our Republic. And now they decide to deradicalize and rejoin that policy conversation, and brand it in damn near insurrectionary terms.
It’s all just very silly. I took Deneen’s arguments in Why Liberalism Failed very seriously, and frankly, that book made me skeptical of this order enough that I would be receptive to far more subversive proposals than things I read in Vox in high school. Is the innovation here that Republicans will become like Christian Democrats in Europe, but with a shittier more conspiratorial culture? Is that the big plan?
So what’s the future? It’s not revolutionary. We’re going to have two parties having a slightly healthier domestic policy discussion, just like they did for most of the 20th century, where they are concerned with things like income and wealth distribution, making institutions fair, keeping our culture healthy, etc. Except one of those parties, the supposedly conservative one, seems to be vulnerable to extreme authoritarian capture and conspiracy theories.
Now I want to be very fair, I’m looking at this in a very hard-nosed political way, in the context of party politics, from a more critical policy point of view, and Deneen writes from a more theoretical angle. That’s good and valuable. I think my expectations were just set differently going into it. Since this post has been mainly critical, and I don’t think the book necessarily deserves that, I’m reading the book in the CONTEXT of this national moment, where things might go very bad because of a very very bad president who has, in part, been enabled and legitimated by the intellectual movement Deneen has helped create (even though I know he, personally, has been critical of DJT). So a lot of the anger towards the book’s arguments are towards something else.
In short, the book made me less bullish on the idea that this national conservative movement will be anything revitalizing. It may merely carry a dangerous authoritarian into the White House, while making few novel contributions to policy. They were policies we really could have had without the fascism. They were ones that could be had healthily in the liberal framework, which I think has always had space for the ideas Deneen advocates.
So a liberal I remain.