_"One of the most important political books of 2018."—Rod Dreher, ___American Conservative__ Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it _is _an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy (...) rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Social‐scientific data, such as those found in Philip E. Converse's 1964 essay, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” have led some to question whether basic assumptions about democratic legitimacy are unfounded. However, by another set of criteria, we have the “democracy” that was intended by the Framers—namely, a liberal representative system that avoids strong civic engagement by the citizenry. At its deepest level, the American system has been designed to ensure elite influence over the main ambitions of (...) American policy: the expansion of public and private power. When social scientists accumulate findings of civic disengagement and ignorance, it is wrongly supposed to be an indictment of the citizenry; rather, those findings should be understood as the expected result of a certain set of commitments throughout American political history, of which civic apathy and ignorance are the desired outcomes. (shrink)