The Problem With Liberty: A Warning to Conservatives

By Patrick J. Deneen | December 1, 2015

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As we fully enter the political season, we will be constantly subjected to the narrative that we must choose between robust individual liberty and compassionate statism. Conservatives (including conservative Catholics) should resist this narrative and should seek every opportunity to challenge and change it.

Against the rising specter of engrossing statism, conservatives have grown accustomed to invoking liberty, especially liberty grounded in individual rights and autonomy. We should recognize that liberalism has an equal, if not greater, claim to provide liberty.

That claim has more purchase, especially for young people, because it is being backstopped by a government that is a more reliable provider for the experience of individual autonomy than the unpredictable and more unforgiving market. The indifference of the market seems more likely to lead young people to end up living as dependents in their parent’s basements than leading independent lives.

Liberated Julia

Democrats have been very clear that it is liberal autonomy that they promise. Recall one of the most revealing Obama campaign ads of 2012, produced solely for the internet (from which it has now disappeared). It was entitled The Life of Julia, and in a series of slides it sought to show how government programs had supported a woman named Julia at every point in her life, from preschool funds to college loans to assistance for a startup to healthcare and finally retirement.

The Life of Julia portrayed a woman who appeared to exist without any human ties or relationships, except—in one poignant slide—a child that had suddenly appeared but who was about to be taken away on a little yellow school bus, and as far as we are shown, is never seen again. No parents, no husband, a child who disappears.

If “liberty” is the watchword of the conservative movement, then what is wrong with Julia? Julia is the perfect apotheosis of the free individual. If the objection is that she has achieved her liberty through the government, not the market, then our debates are over means, not ends.

It turns out that the real problem is liberty itself—especially a vision of liberty unaccompanied by concrete duties and responsibilities to one another, whose ideal is abstract relationships increasingly and ever-more comprehensively mediated through the State. Because for Julia ( and the denizen of the modern liberal state) our truest liberty is achieved when it protects us from any particular obligations, responsibilities, and duties—a condition best guaranteed by the abstract relationships mediated through the modern nation state.

This was the main point of Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne’s latest book, Our Divided Political Heart, where he argued that “community” and the State were the same thing. The point was summed up in a line stated several times during the most recent Democratic National Convention, “The government is the only thing we all belong to.”

Early conservative thinkers recognized this as the “end-game” of liberalism. It sought, to the greatest extent possible, the elimination of all constitutive ties to any mediating or civil institution, to be replaced by our direct relationship with the State. This would be accomplished not by enslaving the population, but by promising that this condition constituted the very essence of liberation. This was the basic insight of Tocqueville’s culminating chapters of Democracy in America: that the democratic despotism of a mild “tutelary” state would come about not by force and terror, but by the willing acquiescence of an isolated and individuated citizenry.

Despotism Realized

We begin to see the realization of Tocqueville’s prediction with ever-growing clarity in our own times in the a new, kinder, and gentler total State. It promises its citizenry liberty at every turn, and that liberty involves ever-greater freedom from the partial institutions of civil society, with these institutions remade in accordance with the aims of the State. The united states as sovereign political units have been almost wholly eviscerated, and are now largely administrative units for the federal government.

Satisfied with that victory, we now see extraordinary efforts to “break” two institutions that have always been most resistant to the total State: the churches and the family. We see an unprecedented effort by the federal government to abridge religious liberty by conscripting religious institutions like Little Sisters of the Poor (and Notre Dame) to be providers of abortifacients, sterilization, and contraception—in the name of individual liberty. We can expect determined and even ferocious efforts to bend churches to accept gay marriage as a norm, even to the point of forcing them entirely out of the civil realm and removing their tax exemptions because of their “discrimination.”

We see increasing efforts of the government to “liberate” children from their families—represented perhaps most chillingly by MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry explaining that the greatest obstacle to State education has been the pervasive notion that kids “belong” to families rather than belonging “to whole communities.” After nodding to the authority of families, she declared: “I believe our children are not our private property, they are not just extensions of ourselves. They are independent, individual beings. . . . we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good.”

This broader social, cultural, political, and economic pedagogy is having extraordinary success. A recent Pew study on the behavior and beliefs of the “Millennial” generation—those eighteen to thirty-two years old—suggests that this is the least connected, most individualistic, and therefore “freest” generation in American history. In comparison to previous generations at a similar point in life, they are least likely to belong to a political party, least likely to be members of a church, least likely to be married by age thirty-two.

They are a generation that is increasingly formed by a notion of autonomy as the absence of any particular ties or limiting bonds—and while they highly mistrust most institutions and relationships, they nevertheless view the government as a benign source of support for their autonomy. And they tend to be overwhelming supporters of liberal policies and politicians—in the name of liberty.

The Little Platoons

Conservatives of an earlier generation like Robert Nisbet recognized that the rise of individual autonomy and centralized power would grow together, that Leviathan would expand in the name of liberty. He understood that the most fundamental obstacle to the rise and expansion of the State was the “little platoons” praised by Edmund Burke: particular and real ties to familial, religious, and civil institutions.

He called for a “new laissez faire,” a laissez-faire of groups. He understood that what would prevent the rise of the kind of the liberty promised by Leviathan would be something like a robust patchwork of more local institutions and relationships that affords true responsibility demanded of adults: debts and gratitude to each other, obligations and responsibilities that should and must be grounded in real human relationships, not in a dependency upon a distant and impersonal State. Such arrangements reject the cold indifference of a world composed of radically individuated selves connected only abstractly through the State.

Even as we are about to be buffeted by countless political slogans, we need to recognize that conservatives have not cornered the market in promoting “liberty,” and if that is their totem, the Progressives will win the debate, as on most fronts they already are. What distinguishes Conservatism historically is not that it believes in liberty understood as individual autonomy, but that it has always understood that liberty—understood as freedom from an over-imposing state—is the necessary but not sufficient condition for living a human life in families, communities, religious institutions, and a whole range of relationships that encourage us to practice the arts of responsible self-governance.

“The Problem With Liberty: A Warning to Conservatives” is a slightly revised version of an article that first ran in the Irish Rover, Notre Dame’s independent student newspaper.

Further Reading:

Patrick Deneen’s The Neo-Conservative Imagination (part 3 includes links to the first two parts)

Thomas Storck’s The Catholic and the Modern Loss of Purpose

Aaron Taylor’s Pope Francis’s Conservatism of Joy

His The Twilight of Conservatism

Matthew Gerkin’s Shameless Lovers of Liberty

LawProf61

Patrick:
Your last three words (well, two, since two are hyphenated) say it all: “responsible self-governance” – and encapsulate why conservatism so often fails to resonate with millennials (and earlier generations of young people).

It is liberalism, not conservatism, that lays the groundwork for the “progressive” state, because it is liberalism that sells “liberty” as freedom unattached to consequences; consequences that, as you note, increasingly sever the individual’s ties to others whom he or she *should* care about, but comes not to care about. (Or, at least, to care about less than they do the exercise of their new-found “liberty.”)

One need only look at the current “sexual assault on campus” hysteria, and ask: But who was it that pitched the “sexual revolution” as liberation in the first place? It was not conservatives.

50 years on, the consequences of a culture that promotes heedless sexuality are clear: the highest rate of growth of sexually-transmitted diseases is among 15-24 year-olds. The largest number of abortions take place among young, unmarried women. And now, the generation that came of age during “free love” is retiring, as their successors preside over a climate of absurdly repressive authoritarian control over student behavior that not only squelches “free love,” but free speech and due process! And no one blinks an eye. (Need we mention that women have been uniquely harmed by this culture? Ironies are everywhere, and progressives whistle past them…)

Liberals preached that “liberty” was the the absence of those meddlesome social structures that impeded “free” individual choice: age, wisdom, etiquette, propriety, modesty, parents, family, and (always), the church and God. Conservatives taught that the only liberty – and certainly, the best assurance of liberty from overly intrusive government – is SELF-RESTRAINT. Which does not sound at all like “liberty” to young, inexperienced ears.

But we see what happens when the social structures that instill self-restraint and reinforce its value are devalued and eroded. Soon it becomes necessary to have an ever-larger state to “protect” us from the consequences of the very choices that liberals proclaimed as “liberating” decades earlier.

Thus does the “liberal” mask of “liberty” come off and the true “progressive” face of leviathan government become apparent.

Progressives conveniently avoid responsibility for their role in the need for “more government,” by pointing to that last bastion of freedom, the “free market,” lambasting its “excesses” and apparent cruelty. But the market is no different than the rest of society. If run by those whose sense of self-restraint or responsibility to others has been severely eroded, it will be neither more nor less cruel than the sexual culture that sees sexuality as a spectator sport, marriage as unnecessary, children as burdens, and the ability to destroy them as the high water mark of femininity.

Ah, but admitting that would mean admitting that they were wrong about the sexual revolution. And we mustn’t have that. So progressives’ role in the elimination of self-restraint, and the corresponding coarsening of culture is ignored, and “the market” (and liberty in general) takes the rap. Young people fall for it in droves.

None of this would even be possible if the target audience knew a bit of history. But alas, they don’t. Or, worse, they know only the “history” that progressives teach them, in movies and TV (Hollywood), in the media, and – the pièce de résistance – on college campuses. Revisionist history is de rigueur, and the truth becomes just one of many “personal narratives.”

Conservatives have always had the harder task, because they are pitching the long game – self-restraint now, liberty later – and because progressives know that by targeting young people and obscuring history, they virtually ensure that the generation most affected by their mistakes will be least likely to hold them accountable. (Admittedly, they may be hoisted on their own progressive pétard, á là Mizzou and Yale. But other than a bit of schadenfreude, that benefits no one.)

Our task is difficult because it depends upon common sense, wisdom, knowledge of history, and reason. Few are born with these traits; they must be inculcated. The opposition, by contrast, appeals to ignorance, passion, helplessness and a distorted sense of “compassion.” And these, regrettably, are abundant.
DavidM

Interesting thoughts. But M H-P’s view, at least abstractly considered, is in fact correct, is it not? (It is “chilling” only in light of her more particular ideological commitments.)

You can claim that the free market and big centralized government can be viewed as alternate means to achieving liberal freedom (individualistic autonomy). But when the central government starts actively squelching diversity in ways that obviously harm individual autonomy, how is the narrative of promoting ‘liberty’ (in the sense of actual individual autonomy) a compelling interpretation of such actions on the part of government?

In the narrative of “we must choose between robust individual liberty and compassionate statism,” perhaps the key concept is not really what we mean by “liberty” but what we mean by “compassionate.” I suspect the latter concept is just as or more heavily freighted with deceptive ideological baggage, in comparison with the former, and is logically prior, in that it is differing conceptions of “compassion” that motivate differing conceptions of “liberty.”
Thomas Storck

Can’t we recognize that conservatism, American style, is simply a form of liberalism, equally harmful to human well being as are all forms of liberalism? Each promotes choice – simply choice about different things.
Liam

We should add trade unions to the list of little platoons of self governance.