“‘I Don’t Want to Violently Overthrow the Government. I Want Something Far More Revolutionary.’”
Ian Ward (Politico Magazine, 8 June 2023). Genre: long-form profile of Patrick Deneen occasioned by the publication of Regime Change (2023). The wiki’s principal source for Deneen’s biography, intellectual formation, and the postliberal vocabulary he has been crystallizing since Why Liberalism Failed (2018) — including the terms “common-good conservatism,” “aristopopulism,” and “Party of Order vs. Party of Progress” — and for the documentation of his entanglement with JD Vance, Kevin Roberts, and the Postliberal Order cohort.
What the Profile Adds
The article’s opening scene (250 conservative-intelligentsia attendees at Catholic University; Vance entering and immediately hugging Deneen; a panel that included Kevin Roberts and Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy) is the most vivid available documentation of postliberalism’s institutional arrival in Washington. By 2023 Deneen is no longer a contrarian academic; he is the philosophical figurehead the New Right’s elected officials physically embrace.
Biographical Sources of Deneen’s Postliberalism
Ward traces the through-line:
- Catholic upbringing in Windsor, Connecticut.
- Rutgers undergraduate (early 1980s). Met Wilson Carey McWilliams, the communitarian political theorist whose 1973 The Idea of Fraternity in America taught Deneen there was “an important and undervalued counter-tradition in American politics that speaks the language of fraternity and friendship, of community and citizenship.” McWilliams’s politics were “unapologetically left.”
- Christopher Lasch (read in graduate school): an iconoclastic social critic whose anti-liberal, populist-religious-tradition framework Deneen absorbed.
- Princeton assistant professor (1997–2004). Surrounded by Rawlsian liberals; denied tenure in 2004 — Deneen suspects partly for his anti-liberalism. “I was shown the door.” Romance (Deneen’s friend): Princeton “may have reinforced and intensified his already strong dislike of liberalism.”
- Wilson Carey McWilliams’s death (March 2005): “When Carey died, he lost something that centered him.”
- Georgetown (2005–2012). Founded the Tocqueville Forum; opened with an inaugural lecture by Antonin Scalia (2006). Started writing about peak oil theory (2007); the 2008 financial crisis vindicated his “natural limits” critique without requiring the specific peak-oil claim. Co-founded Front Porch Republic (2008).
- Notre Dame (2012–present). Why Liberalism Failed (January 2018). Met Viktor Orbán in Budapest, autumn 2019.
- The Postliberal Order Substack (Nov 2021) co-launched with Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold. Compact (Mar 2022), launched by Sohrab Ahmari.
The McWilliams biography is the wiki’s most important new datum on Deneen’s intellectual formation: his original commitments are to a left-leaning communitarianism, a critique of corporate-managerial elites, and a defense of localism. The shift to a state-power postliberalism is therefore not the natural extension of those commitments but a significant departure that his Rutgers cohort regards with concern. McWilliams’s daughter (who studied under Deneen at Princeton) explicitly worries that Deneen has “lost sight of an essential component of [her] father’s thinking” — that there are alternatives to liberalism “much more frightening” than its defects.
New Vocabulary Deneen Crystallizes in Regime Change
- Common-good conservatism: Deneen’s preferred name for his framework. Distinct from Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism (which it overlaps with) and from National Conservatism (which it explicitly rejects). Deneen: “It’s not that any of us is anti-nation, but there has to be something both less than and more than the nation” — local communities + “specifically Catholic notion of universal humanity.”
- Aristopopulism: an alliance between postliberal elites and conservative populists — non-elites with substantively traditional commitments, led by elites who share their values. The pseudo-Machiavellian framing: a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class,” resulting in a regime “superficially the same” as the current order but informed by “a fundamentally different ethos.”
- Party of Order vs. Party of Progress: Deneen’s binary recasting of American political conflict. “Party of Progress” = liberal and conservative elites aligned around social and economic “progress.” “Party of Order” = non-elites who want unions, anti-corporate checks, abortion limits, religion in the public sphere, and an end to “wokeness.” The terms are an unmarked borrowing from 19th-century French Saint-Simonian and Comtean vocabulary; the Saint-Simonian “Party of Order” was the proto-authoritarian counter-party to revolutionary republicanism.
Policy Proposals from Regime Change
Deneen lists transitional policies that could “dilute the power of the current ruling class” before regime change comes to pass:
- Expand the size of the U.S. House of Representatives.
- “Break up” Washington by redistributing federal agencies around the country.
- Strengthen labor unions; expand industrial policy.
- Create a “Family Czar” to promote family formation.
- Tax elite-college endowments.
- Restrict or outright abolish the sale of pornography.
Field’s verdict (quoted by Ward): “I have not seen a single policy put forward by [the postliberals] that wouldn’t be better pursued within the existing liberal democratic framework, so the idea of an overhaul of the actual regime seems really unnecessarily provocative and reckless.”
Field’s Frame: “Illiberal Constitutionalism”
Laura K. Field tells Ward that “fascist” is the wrong term and offers instead “illiberal constitutionalism” — “a sort of halfway house between liberal democracy and traditional authoritarianism that maintains the trappings of a liberal regime while dramatically expanding the power of the state.” This is the same frame she develops at book length in Furious Minds. The Ward profile is the most concise public statement of it.
The Title
Deneen, addressing his Catholic audience: “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government. I want something far more revolutionary than that.” The line is the cleanest single statement of the postliberal pitch — the project is more radical than January 6, not less; what’s new is the refusal of violent means in favor of structural capture of state and cultural institutions.
When Ward asks directly whether January 6 would be an example of acceptable Machiavellian tactics, Deneen says: “For me, it wouldn’t be.” The wiki’s structural reading: that “for me” is doing significant work. It is a personal disavowal, not a categorical one.
Where It Connects in the Wiki
- Patrick Deneen — substantially expanded with this biography
- Regime Change — the book this article launches
- Why Liberalism Failed — the prior work whose modesty Regime Change renounces
- Postliberalism — Common-Good Conservatism vs. National Conservatism distinction
- Postliberal Order — the Substack
- Wilson Carey McWilliams — Deneen’s mentor (page created from this source)
- Adrian Vermeule — Postliberal Order co-founder; Common Good Constitutionalism
- Sohrab Ahmari — Compact
- JD Vance — explicitly identifies as “postliberal right” in the panel that follows Deneen’s Catholic University speech
- Kevin Roberts — on the same Catholic University panel
- Viktor Orbán — 2019 Budapest meeting
- Laura K. Field — “illiberal constitutionalism” framing
- Furious Minds — Field’s book-length development of the same diagnosis
- National Conservatism — Deneen’s preferred frame (Common Good Conservatism) is distinct from NatCon
- MAGA New Right