How Do You Replace an Elite?

 In January of 2018, just a year after Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency, the political theorist Patrick Deneen published “Why Liberalism Failed,” an ideally timed argument about how the inner logic of modern liberalism had led to social decay and political misrule.

The book earned praise and respectful engagement from many different corners (no less a modern liberal than Barack Obama urged people to read it).

Deneen has answered those critics by producing a boldly prescriptive sequel, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future” — and naturally this time the reviews are mostly hostile, because who really wants a prescription anyway?

Neither Maistre nor Schmitt appears in the index of “Regime Change.” Deneen turns instead to Aristotle and Machiavelli, both decidedly preliberal, and to various critics and dissidents within the American experiment, from the anti-Federalists to Christopher Lasch. 

But the key forerunners of the new regime he has in mind seem to be Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, and Alexis de Tocqueville — all figures who fit within the modern mainstream rather than standing well outside, and who arguably embody a conservative liberalism or a liberal conservatism rather than a politics of right-wing revolution.

New York Times 28 June 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opinion/american-elite-patrick-deneen-post-liberalism.html