I was reading Vox's review of Patrick Deneen's "Regime Change" when I realized that I've heard Deneen's arguments before through my conservative friend. For those, like myself, who have never heard of Deneen, he's a professor at Notre Dame who wrote "How Liberalism Failed," a 2018 book recommended by the likes of Barack Obama and other left of center luminaries, despite the fact that Deneen seems to blame them for all of America's problems. I'm not really interested in Deneen's book; according to Vox, it's heavy on opinions and straw-men rather than facts and statistics. Deneen (and my friend) blame liberalism for destroying small-town America and Christianity through the ill-guided progressiveness of elites, who are more interested in maintaining power than really implementing liberal policies. Elites are, according to Deneen (and my buddy) basically anyone with a college degree working a knowledge sector job. That classification would include people like my wife, who is an HR manager making around 72,000 a year. Pretty elite, right? From the article:
"Deneen compares this new elite unfavorably to medieval aristocrats, and even the wealthy of Gilded Age America because of their disconnection from place and tradition. Unlike aristocrats, who ruled over specific land and a specific group of peasants, the modern elite is transient and cut off from the working people who surround them. The nature of this elite, he argues, reflects “the culminating realization of liberalism”: a system that theoretically opposes hierarchy but actually has given rise to new and veiled forms of stratification."
My wife, who comes from a rural Indiana town, who was the first person to go to college in her family, isn't cut off from the working people around her. She's married to a man (me) who does have a college degree but who has chosen to work as a small farmer. We are surrounded by people who don't possess secondary education, as well as those who do, and the argument that a middle-management job somehow cuts you off from any blue-collar person is absurd. My sister and her husband both have knowledge sector jobs in Washington, D.C., and they have working class friends. Elite college professors like Deneen, however, likely are fairly isolated from plumbers and farmers. Forbes states that 53 percent of adults over 25 have some secondary education. Deneen's definition of elites is ridiculous, but there's a method to his madness. It's much easier to get angry at an overpaid college professor sipping his latte and chowing down on avocado toast if you're a manual laborer than it is to get pissed off at a millionaire like Donald Trump. That college professor probably doesn't make much more than a plumber. It's the Welfare Queen strategy: forget about the rich not paying any taxes, what about that unemployed single mom on disability driving her caddy around the neighborhood? People naturally feel angrier about the person closer to them in social status. From the article:
"In Deneen’s thinking, it is axiomatic that the central divide in Western politics is between the villainous liberal elite (the “few”) and the culturally conservative mass public (“the many”). The liberal elites wish to impose their cultural vision on society and attack the customs and traditions of ordinary people; the many, who are instinctively culturally conservative, have risen under the banner of leaders like Trump to oppose them.
Except how do we know that liberals really are “the few?”
Deneen doesn’t cite election or polling data to support his theory of a natural conservative majority. Trump has never won the popular vote while on the ballot; his party performed historically poorly in two midterm elections since his rise to power. Polling on the cultural issues Deneen so cares about, like same-sex marriage, often finds majority support for liberal positions."
My friend once told me that the bedrock of the Republican Party is socially conservative young families. The data doesn't really back that up. Pew Research's analysis of the 2020 election found that 49 percent of Biden's voters were people under 50, while Trump voters under 50 composed 39 percent of his total. More and more young people are voting for the left of center party, not Republicans.There's no tiny liberal elite ruling over a vast conservative mass.
What's killing small towns isn't liberalism, it's capitalism. Purdue Pharma pushed OxyContin on doctors who in turn pushed in on patients. Factories outsourced jobs to other countries and fought labor unions, leaving small town decimated. Christianity is declining in America because the religious right have overly involved themselves in politics.
Liberalism as a boogieman responsible for all of America's problems is literally the only "truth" conservatives have. They invest intellectual capital in pushing this bogus theory without relying on citations or data because they know that they have no solutions, only scapegoats. According to Vox's review, Deneen's solution basically amounts to a conservative theocracy, intent on suppressing belief disparate to their own. Fascism isn't really an attractive political stance (although that hasn't stopped Ron Desantis from making it the cornerstone of his presidential campaign), so "intellectuals" like Deneen will beat around the bush and advocate "Regime Change" without directly calling for gulags and secret police. The data doesn't support Deneen's conclusions, but that doesn't matter, because he engages in emotional reasoning. It all feels right, just like any good conspiracy theory, and what are fact to get in the way of your opinions?
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