Regime Change: A Review of Patrick Deneen’s Book
Matters of social organization are complex and changing a society’s organization is no easy task. It requires a good vision and a pragmatic, effective means to implement the vision. As I walked on the campus at the University of Notre Dame earlier this week, it is after all just a few miles from my home, I reminisced for I have been coming to this place for more than 55 years.
There was a time in the US when the society was not only benign, but actually very much alive, vibrant, great. I certainly remember such even as late as the 1960s and into the 1970s. America was a better place then. There was a We and we had a common culture and ethos, White people (i.e., Americans) and Christians were not demonized, and the place was safe. We were united or so it seemed, and we all knew right from wrong. We knew who we were and we were proud of being Americans. We were the good guys. We talked and laughed, were not afraid, and the sky was the limit. But all of that has changed.
Political Philosophy Professor Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame, after insightfully depicting the Liberal Order as clever tyranny by a plutocracy, offers a vision of a society that brings us back to a better time, perhaps a stronger and more vibrant 1787 in the sense that Federalism will be given a new lease on life and justified by the right ordered vision he sets forth. The heart of his proposal is to change the hearts and minds of the socio-economic elites, or, if they don’t change, to put in their place a new crop of elites with an ethos that unites them with what is good for themselves and for the people.
This is perhaps the first, and most important accomplishment, of Deneen’s Regime Change. He identifies the problem not in some abstract sense, but in terms we all can understand if we have not experienced it. Perhaps most importantly, he locates the problem in the elites – the plutocracy. This is very brave and very correct for in the Liberal Order, the most successful are the most powerful.
The new vision is a “mixed constitution” as he puts it where the elites and the ordinary live in harmony and not at odds with each other as is the case now. Deneen cites to consistent threads of political thought from Aristotle through Polybius through Aquinas to Cardinal Danielou and even Pope Francis to justify his position. Of course, many of the thinkers of antiquity dealt with situations in which the society was homogenous, which is not now the case. Christianity, Catholicism in particular, is not at odds with ancient wisdom but is its perfection he argues as it is true. The ethos allowing this mixed constitution is a recognition of the importance of faith, family, community, tradition, and it is in the belief of these things as good for society in general – and the new elites in particular – that virtue is located. This important observation, and proposal, by Deneen is to fashion a society in accord with the Natural Law and it implicates the Decalogue with all that sensibly flows from those basic rules of human behavior. With this, Deneen also answers the question that plagued the American Founders, who were concerned that their plan of self-interest and offsetting factions may not be enough for the elite to govern impartially for the betterment of all. Deneen locates the virtue for the new elites in an explicit, consistent, coherent, identifiable and reasonably obtainable set of clear rules. Virtue is found in devotion to the common good, a concept that is capable of definition and knowledge given its history in all societies, especially the West. This is a great improvement over what the American Founders started with in 1787 as the Founders could not agree on the principles of virtue to inform public life. Indeed, the Founders surrendered to a code of conduct determined by self-interest and competing factions.
Deneen seeks to preserve the republic – he says so explicitly, even though the history of republics is oftentimes such that they are opposed to Catholicism and even the Natural Law. The method for changing the elites or at least to make them virtuous, involves something he terms “muscular Aristopopulism.” This requires unity of the ordinary people of all walks of life and of all racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. This is to be a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” so as to allow a “postliberal order in which existing political forms can remain in place.” This effort will require the leadership of an “elite cadre skilled at directing and elevating popular resentments,” so as to exert “the raw assertion of political power” which rests on “the force of a threat”. The vision Deneen articulates is meant to be an invitation for a new elite to step up, and an offer for the old elites to reform or step down which is an offer that they should accept given this movement of common people that Deneen urges as necessary for change. The commoners will be united and motivated by a vision of maintaining their way of life with the knowledge that opportunity is slowly slipping away from them. I recognize that he seeks unity of all the different groups of people against the elites, however, I believe the frequent use of the term “working class” may stand to weaken national identity, something I discuss later. It smacks a bit of Marxism which is itself an ideology used to destroy nations.
Deneen sets forth specific initiatives to preserve the republic while building the ethos needed to sustain the virtue he supports. These initiatives reject the individualism of Liberalism while promoting community, faith, family, tradition, memory, unity or a “We” again. To that extent he targets breaking up the economic and political power of the elites. One such initiative is to revise the Congressional Apportionment Act or 2 USC 2A which fixes the number of members of the United States House of Representatives so as to allow the number of Congressmen to grow, or decline, with the number of people in the country. Instead of the current ratio of about one Congressman for 750,000 people, it could be that there be elected a Congressman for every 10,000 or so thereby swelling the membership of the House so as to make it harder for the powerful private interests to control what has been known as “the people’s house.” And, instead of primaries, there should be caucuses, a suggestion which he says is to reduce the power of the elites to demagogue the population.
Monopolies must be shattered, and the headquarters of the various agencies of the Federal Government should be dispersed around the country instead of being allowed to reside in Washington DC. National service should be a requirement of all able-bodied citizens, while manufacturing industries should be encouraged to come into existence and grow. In one suggestion that sounds of Catholic societies like Salazar’s Portugal and Franco’s Spain, Deneen proposes the representation of various estates before the governmental authorities, which means recognition of various industries and professions so as to regulate and protect their work, markets, and the morality of society at large. And, instead of four year universities, trade schools should be promoted while student indebtedness reduced or eliminated. At this point, Professor Michael Hudson’s suggestions as well as those of Dr. Richard Werner should be added to the mix as they place real power with the productive, the innovative, and the local – which is something Deneen professes to support.
These are all thoughtful and serious proposals that would more probably be implemented after the power of the elites has been broken, or they have been removed. And as such these proposals would help to achieve Deneen’s vision, but they will be fiercely resisted until the current corrupt elites are converted or removed. In this world where everyone only throws stones and has no solutions, where increasingly radical rhetoric and ideas are met with ever escalating unhinged commentary, we need a calm, cool mind to sit down and point a principled way forward. Many are hopeful that mind is Professor Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame, my alma mater, and that his vision can be effectively implemented as he says – peacefully. That is after all at the heart of patriotism, a word that he does not use. Patriotism is the love of one’s country for it is that place, with all that is in it, that has given one existence and more. The corrupt liberal elites have long not operated in solidarity with the rest of their countrymen and so have used and further distorted an already deeply flawed ideology, Liberalism, to advance their aims of increasing their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. These elites long ago forsook patriotism, for patriotism requires us to admit a bond with others and to work for and want what is best for all fellow countrymen. Patriotism calls us to solidarity with our fellow countrymen to desire their development as persons both materially and spiritually, and the development of our people or peoples both materially and spiritually in accordance with the Catholic Faith.
Points of Critique
Deneen has done a great service for even if one does not accept his argument, he has established the method by which to evaluate change or to complete the plan to effect change – target the elites as the source of societal disorder, propose a better vision, and propose a movement or method to effect right order. I do believe that certain vital matters need to be addressed for any effective change of regimes, and hence I critique Deneen.
First, Deneen is efficient and correct in his thinking that the elites control the institutions. They are the center of gravity of the destructive Liberal Order and they must be changed out as he suggests. It is a waste of time to talk about one law or another unless the elites are changed. That having been said, Deneen keeps real power in the powerful private interests – he just changes the names and the faces. Without at least some changes in the Constitution or in the fundamental laws of the land – such as setting out the basis of the laws to be in the Decalogue or the Catholic Faith or a defined common good of the American people or peoples – then there will be no lasting and meaningful change for there will be no clear law, no easily identifiable standard, by which to hold up the conduct of the new elites. A wink and a nod, a tacit understanding, a hopeful longing, just is not enough as we have found out from the last 247 years’ experience of this republic.
Hungary’s constitution recognizes a Hungarian people with a debt of gratitude to Christianity. Russia’s constitution, while denying any special place to any religion and therefore being a secular state, recognizes the value of the Russian people. Portugal’s 1933 constitution recognized the fundamental law was for the benefit of the Portuguese people. Costa Rica’s constitution protects the cultural ideas and values of her people. The US Constitution has a Preamble but it is very vague made more so with the opening phrase, “We the people” followed by very general purposes, which themselves are undefined. There is no established religion, no defined people, no protection of culture stated in the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence references Government’s duty to protect rights with reference to the American people and a history of abuses at the hands of the King of Great Britain.
Second, a major area of regulation is needed and that is a set of statutes to control individuals and their firms which operate on the international stage and wield way too much power. Like, say for instance, Blackrock which is in the news these days. What I mean is that there should be mechanisms in place and utilized by which to punish bad actors like George Soros, Bill Gates, and the Freemasons to name a few who exert international influence and spread pernicious doctrines that destabilize the world community by destabilizing domestic societies. These actors spread ideas and cause mischief that have the effect of shaping culture, medicine, academe, and societies in general. They do so, and have done so, from the comfort of the United States because of our geopolitical value. Their actions are sins against solidarity and development, both of which are of the order of justice and charity, and both of which are needed for the common good not just in domestic societies but also in the international community. Their actions should be criminalized and punished as such. While there are some international statutes on the books like the one setting forth the International Criminal Court that criminalize a number of actions to include genocide, and while the US has something like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that penalizes private parties for bribing foreign officials, more is needed. Even Emer de Vattel (1714-1767) whose Law of Nations so heavily influenced the American Founders, and who confused the notion of nation with state (something which I think Deneen also does), recognized the need to punish, or hold accountable, those private individuals whose citizenship is of one country but whose harm is done to other peoples in other countries.
Third, I take some issue with Deneen’s view of American society and I believe that any effective change must take account of the fact that there is an American people which has been relentlessly under attack for quite a while. Therefore, the common good must take into account the development – spiritually and materially – of that group, as a group. The same with Blacks, Latins, and other peoples in the US. We cannot fuse the peoples, fuse the races, and Deneen makes a troubling comment which is that “I don’t want to be misunderstood as denying the justified and necessary commitment to racial equality and respect owed toward people who have been historically marginalized and excluded.” “Racial equality and respect” have been, and still are being used, as weapons, and weaponized ideas are something that I happen to know a little about.
There is a good case to be made that from about 1787 until about 1947 there was a moderate to good degree of cultural and social solidarity in the US, and if it was not vertical, it was at least horizontal. The dominant culture, the ruling elites, during this period were mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) (and somewhat today also), and they had some loyalty to the people, though their primary loyalty was to their own class for their own profit, control and existence. Federalism was in place and was working fairly well keeping morals in place, but that all that disintegrated when the First Amendment was applied to the individual states in 1925 with the Supreme Court case known as Gitlow v New York. There then followed a series of court decisions that constituted, or were used, to serve as assaults on the foundations of the American society and the people who composed it, the Americans who were, and are, White, Christian and native. The first major assaults were the removal of religion from public life in 1947 in the name of separation of church and state with the Everson v. Board of Education decision. The American people were cut off from God at that point and so only bad things could happen in greater intensity. A few years later, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education requiring desegregation and racial integration all in the name of interracial justice or racial equality opened the gates to using these concepts to attack the majority population on racial grounds. Reproductive freedom which meant contraception and abortion, followed by freedom of expression and speech which meant all manner of pornography, and then the approval of same-sex marriage and more, all targeted the dominant population by destroying morality and virtue. Masculinity, solidarity, identity, the family – all these things were being attacked and people turned against each other. The Brown decision with its mantra of racial equality is a “sacred cow” of the elites today, and that must be re-looked if not also overturned as it permitted not racial equality but rather racial strife and conflict in the name of competition. We see in this a process of fusing of the nations which is being used to create a new, global people, a cultural tower of Babel as Black and American institutions are steadily destroyed. What is needed is the development of the various nations as nations, and not in conflict with each other.
All of this further makes the case that the fundamental law, the Constitution, must have written in it either adherence to the Catholic religion or acceptance of Catholic principles either explicitly or by any other name. Alternatives may be reference to and acceptance of the Law of Nations as a foundational organizing principle, which by the way was rejected by the American Founders at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as one of their last acts on Friday September 14, 1787 by James Madison. The Law of Nations is a body of law that Catholic thought developed beginning with the School of Salamanca in the 1500s, and Protestant and secular thinking distorted it to serve the interests of the powerful private interest. Nonetheless, it presents principles that should inform Catholic thought and action.
Fourth, the effort to remove or convert the current elites must be realistically evaluated. Violence is very possible, if not likely. The source of violence will come from the corrupt elites struggling to maintain their control and riches. I find the Professor’s use of the term the “force of threat” rather interesting. I believe it is better to say the “threat of force” with the threat being credible. The current elites are very adept at sniffing out baseless threats, identifying weaknesses, and then crushing their opponents. Which brings me to my next point, point number five.
Peter Thiel – “Class Traitor”?
Deneen mentions “class traitors” as possible leaders in the muscular Aristopopulist movement that will have to employ Machiavellian tactics. Madison knew the new elites, the new boss, often contained elements of the old elites, the old bosses, and we have seen this repeatedly in modern history with regime changes in at least Europe, Africa and Latin America. One potential class traitor is the billionaire, tech entrepreneur, US Deep State contractor, Peter Thiel. Vanity Fair in a May, 2022 article entitled “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” laid out in detail Thiel’s support for the formation of a new political movement. In or attracted to that movement were politicians like J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegies) of Ohio, Blake Masters of Arizona, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Marco Rubio of Florida. Thiel funded NatCon, a conference which “push[es] the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction”. Associated with Thiel were Sohrab Amari and by implication Deneen who recognized him as a foxhole buddy in Regime Change. Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz were two of the editorial founders of Compact Magazine which, believed by some, received support from Thiel. The magazine openly admits mixing an understanding of “the common good” with Marxism. As indicated earlier, the natural longing of people to live as a people and to reach their fulfillment or vocation as persons and as a people are subtly modified with the affiliation of Marxist class concepts. People identify and are united primarily by nation, not class, and it is nationalism with its parochial version, the version tied to the soil, called patriotism, that ultimately unites people as friends and serves to form societies. The stability of those societies is determined by right ordering these natural inclinations to serve a legitimate end of the person and society both domestically and internationally.
Max Chafkin says Thiel despises the elites. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Chafkin argues that Thiel wants to get back at the elites who never quite accepted him. This resentment of new money against old money is as old as the republic Deneen is trying to save and Henry Luce was one such technician, like Thiel, who never felt accepted by the real power in America. That may be part of the reason Thiel became an early supporter of Donald Trump.
Thiel is more than a tech billionaire – he is openly homosexual. In 2017 he married Matt Dannzeisin but carried on an affair with a “kept man” by the name of Jeff Thomas who turned up dead March 8 of this year from an apparent suicide. Thiel, according to The Intercept, put Thomas up in a multi-million dollar home with a $ 300,000 car for Thiel’s personal pleasure. There is more. While part of the plutocracy in 2019, he tried for yet a third citizenship: New Zealander. New Zealand is the venue of choice of the elites who want to avoid what they think is a coming holocaust in the US brought about by the very populists of which Deneen writes.
Thiel’s parents were German and came to this country when he was very young. His father was a chemical engineer and never obtained US citizenship. There is some question as to his uncle and his grandfather’s ties to government, but there is no question as to Thiel’s work for the US Government with the various surveillance platforms he developed as CEO of Palantir. When the SVB collapse began in March, 2023, he was one of the first to get wind of it and pulled his money out fast thereby helping to further destabilize the bank. Thiel is not afraid of protecting his own interests and he plays to win, at least for himself.
All of this points to a common dynamic in America which is that good is often hijacked for evil purposes. The concern is that Thiel is deeply conflicted being that he is a “class traitor,” has questionable loyalties to the US and the Americans given his multiple citizenships, and is homosexual who is not loyal even to his husband. While he may be supporting something good, will he stay the course or will he, and other class traitors, just use it for their own benefit? So, there needs to be a movement within the movement to make sure things go the right way.
Overthrowing Tyrants – In Conclusion
It is well established that tyrants may be removed from power. There is a right and a duty to do so. Tyrants have always been understood to mean political leaders who utilize the government and its various agencies for their own desires, or profit, to the detriment of the people or society at large. Tyranny is a violation of the law of God, the Natural Law. In Liberal societies, however, the real power, the ultimate power, resides with the powerful private interests, the rich, the owners. That is the way the Earl of Shaftesbury, Josiah Childs and John Locke wanted it and so the latter wrote his political philosophy to empower the lovers of money, the rich, the best predators. These dedicated society to the service of Mammon, and while the American people struggled to stay a people, it appears in the last 75 years or so the attack is intensifying in ways unimaginable at the founding. For Americans, and all peoples, to be victorious, we must dedicate ourselves to serving the Triune God and His law. One way to do so is to recognize the Natural Law, of which the common good is a definable concept, and conform public policy to it. Ultimately, the recognition of Christ and His religion in the foundational laws of the country is the goal. Only then will the American people, and all peoples in the US and elsewhere, be protected from the rapacity and arbitrariness of the powerful private interests and those who serve money above all else.
We must remember who we are and be willing to sacrifice for who we are, for who our ancestors were, for our children and families, for our people, for our tradition, for our country, for our future. We are called to be patriots and patriotism is good as it is in accord with the Natural Law. Together, united as a people with other peoples, we shall prevail. We must be conversant in Catholic concepts and ideas so as to insert those, defend those, advance those, and more, as the opportunity presents itself. One such opportunity is any movement for regime change and in that sense we should thank Professor Deneen for starting with a positive vision which, while it may need more work, is a step in the right direction.