Much of human history is contextualized by the larger scale conflicts that were happening at the time. Its nice to imagine that this came out of some singular moment in some pre-written ancient history, that our propensity to violence is something that was discovered. The reality of the situation is that the violence we find core to our shared story of our species is that it existed before humans ever did. Animals fight, with full scale wars happening between insect clans, struggles for territory and the survival of your grouping is something innate in many creatures.
We know this to be true, that the violence we cannot seem to escape from is something deep rooted, something we cannot easily get away from. It takes one small thing on the wrong day for anyone to be unable to fight the instinctual reaction to violence. In the ways that humans do, we’ve spent a large amount of our time and effort to quote unquote “evolve” past our animalistic tendencies. When considering violence, it is easy to feel as though we are getting to the point where it can be an issue of the past. In the global north there has been an “unprecedented” period of peace, a narrative only recently cracked by the provocations of Putin. If the “developed” world is close to evolving past violence, why does it still always seem so precarious, waiting for one wrong move by one powerful person to give up the whole charade?
Postliberalism
The growing influence of the writings of Patrick Deneen has been quiet, but not for his lack of effort. His thoughts on postliberalism were originally contextualized in a leftist manner, as a rebellion against the system propping up global capitalism. The liberal democracies that have dominated the world since WW2 have been seen to be rotting from the inside out, and worse, unable to stop the rot. The bureaucracy was too large and encumbered to change anything, the “voted in” politicians were too addicted to the power, and the ever present commodification of ever increasing parts of life seemed to create an endless cycle that would death spiral to the very end.
While some on the left, including notable figures such as Barack Obama, gave kudos to Patrick for his observations of the failings of modern liberal democracies, but critiqued his lack of solutions and overall ambiguity around any proposed alternatives. After several years of trying, and with gradual changes to his political views, Patrick found an audience on the american right.
In a perfect brew of timing and overall social climate, a growing extreme right in america needing a shared set of political ideals to build off of, and Patrick’s growing personal extremism, matched to help each other grow. By gaining the backing of the larger american right, Patrick found the validation he had been craving for years. The right also found a stable foundation to build its thoughts off of, using the framework of postliberalism to posit each pundits personal agenda. Though this, people like Elon Musk found footing for his techno-feudalist ideals, as well as the cover needed to do it under the guise of a greater mission to mars.
This is where I have to say, Patrick is right. Liberal democracy has always been a system that was going to die its slow death, much like the systems it ultimately replaced. Once the rulers no longer had the divine will of god to back them, they had to find a new reason why they had to be the ones on top. Under liberal democracies this became a combination of “democratic will” and money, both of which are unassailable structures in our society.
Money
Until this point, I’ve been conflating capitalism with liberal democracy. Mostly because they are somewhat inseparable, but only in one way. Someone may say, but when we had kings we also had rich, landed nobility. And while the power of this nobility generally was thought to have descended from the king, it is more realistically a reflection of the money of the individual or their inheritance. While most people today would point and say its another form of capitalism, I think that would stretch the terminology too far, as most of the nobility only were able to keep their money and power under lease from the king.
So it seems that the money itself is the abstraction of power, and this would make sense with a historical eye. Julius Ceasar may have been a great general, but it was his ability to gain and use money for loyalty and power that made him historic. Wars throughout written european history tend to fall to the gain of money and other money-making resources. This all brings the question of what money even is. While ostensively its nothing more than some abstract representation of value, there is some instinctual understanding that it is something more than that.
To avoid taking to much of a Focultian stance on the subject, I find its hard to argue that most, if not all, power in the world is taken through violence. You can have leaders, coordinators, people that are decision makers, but to become a ruler takes violence. To rule and be a ruler is to remove the free will of another and make them submit to you, a fairly pure form of violence. While some may “give this willingly”, it seems to me that no one in their right mind would submit themselves to that unless there are other external forces. This is corroborated by our modern world’s abhorrence at slavery, with an understanding that even though someone may put themselves in a slave position, it would only happen under what they view as being much worse circumstances. For circumstances to reach the point where loss of free will is preferable, there must be much greater violent forces in the world.
If we do find that most power comes through the use or threat of violence, which does appear to be the general case, and if money is an abstraction of power, then is it not by extension just an abstraction of violence? To be specific, money works as a unit to wield and enforce violence, enforced through larger economic forces that also utilize the same violence.
What am I getting at
I think it would be naive, however, to act as if money is equivalent to power or to violence. While things like power and violence are abstract concepts, they also are an extension of the free will that drives our very human experience. Each individual is born with an innate personal power and violence, which is quickly subsumed by the larger societal need for cooperation. This is not to say that a release of a personal allowance of power and violence is necessary for cooperation, but under a hierarchy personal power and violence must be surrendered to the greater powers for their use. It is in this surrendering of power that we find money. The underclass of capitalist societies have the least allowance of power. They are not allowed to own their own destinies, forced under the yoke of the capitalists under the threat of violence.
To blatantly state my point, I think that what Patrick either won’t recognize out of fear of alienating his current audience and not getting recognition anymore, or because he hasn’t gone far enough with his thoughts, is that the core issue of liberal democracy is the same core issue of all the systems we so consistently decry for their awfulness. They all are thin veils over violence that is used to uphold a hierarchy. Liberal democracy is so tactful in its use in that its all under the guise of laws and judgements. These are supposed to promise us “justice” and some sort of morally correct answer to our issues, but generally only exist to uphold and enforce the status quo. The same patterns that have always been used to uphold the power concentrated at the top of the hierarchy play out again and again.
While it is hard for many people to imagine a world without hierarchy, I do think it is important for us to recognize the power dynamics that are essential for a hierarchy to exist in the first place. While I think we all like to imagine that there are those of us out there who are better, and who can wield the power inherent in hierarchy responsibly, we must move past this noble-man theory and accept the danger of hierarchy, especially large scale ones. These are guaranteed to reach some race-to-the-bottom of culture, trying to structure itself for stability in its own self interest. You cannot rule over others if there are no others to rule. So we fight wars, create common enemies, take and plunder in a made up zero-sum game. Once we have the raw resources to keep things going, we create a culture to define an in group and an out group, since the hierarchy needs loyalty, and only those in an in group can be trusted to be loyal. These would be the people considered to be a majority in a nation today, such as whites in america.
Even with a democracy with its promise of the “rule of the many”, the violence and subjugation of power leads to the same place, with a small number on top and a growing number beneath. We can even look at contemporary examples of how democracy can vastly differ in execution, from the electoral college of america, to the parliamentary system of the UK. Even looking shortly into history, we can see a democracy only “represents” as many people as those in power will allow it to, with the american 5/8ths “compromise” being the classic example.
A personal favorite thought experiment for democracy would be to imagine a town with two schools. One school has 60% of the students, and as such about 60% of the population has attended, and the other has the remaining 40%. In the new election cycle, the 60% from school A elected one of their own alumns. They love their school, but more than that, they hate the other school. Though they have grown in age, they are unable to see past their childhood school rivalry. The politician cuts funding from school B to give even more to school A. Being that this benefits the majority, this is a “popular” move, in that 60% of people support it. You may think in this world that maybe school B had extra funding, a 50/50 split say. But whats stopping it from already being an unfair distribution, some 70/30 because school B is in the “poor area”. The students from school B now get less resources to learn from, and have worse learning outcomes. For people coming out of school A, this just reinforces what they know about the people at school B, and continue to under-resource.
While rule of the many is significantly better than rule of the few, it is set to fall to the same ailments as all others, with some good number of humanity suffering for the sake of those decided to be above them.
What I find so frustrating about the “postliberalism” movement is its deep-throated embrace of societal systems that are at the best, the same general idea as liberal democracy. At worse, a proposed “solution” is a full state controlled culture and society, or pure libertarianism, letting the capitalists become the feudal lords they’ve always wanted to be. The movement is quick to point out all of the failings of our current system, but instead of digging into any common threads, they seem to just think its something unique to the system, and that replacing it with anything else would be preferable.
What about it all
Do I think all of postliberal thinking should be thrown out? I mean, yes. Obviously. None of its best thoughts are new, anyone who’s been paying attention has been calling out the issues with liberal democracies for nearly centuries now. I think its hard for me to not see Patrick Deneen as a full blown grifter, if not for his shopping around of ideas for recognition, for his lack of systemic thinking outside of what is known. I think its fairly obvious that the issue with liberal democracy is the same issues found with all hierarchies, stemming from their refusal to even acknowledge their use of violence to maintain themselves. Until we can as a larger society recognize what we lose by submitting to the larger systems around us that are forced upon us, we will continue in the cycles we have seen for millenia.